Gen Z-focused social-led media brand The News Movement has secured new investment believed to exceed $10m as it moves out of its “scrappy start-up” era.
The News Movement now comes under a new parent company, Caliber, alongside US politics social brand The Recount, which it acquired in 2023, and Capsule, a lifestyle and trends brand.
Chief executive and co-founder Ramin Beheshti told Press Gazette the creation of the parent company was “to show that we are now kind of moving out of the scrappy start-up into more of a mature media company that is more than just one social media account, which is The News Movement”.
He felt it is also a “green shoot moment for not only us, but I think the industry or journalism as a whole”, saying the new developments show that “you can build businesses that reach younger audiences. You can create substantial revenues off the back of them. You can create additional products.”
The News Movement initially arrived in beta in November 2021 before a wider launch a year later.
As well as ex-Dow Jones chief product and technology officer Beheshti, the publisher’s other co-founders include Caliber CPTO Dion Bailey, founding editor-in-chief Kamal Ahmed who left to join The Telegraph as director of audio (a role he left in June), William Lewis who has since become The Washington Post’s publisher and CEO, and Eleanor Breen, who is now chief of staff at The Post.
Caliber has secured investment from UK-based fund Forta, which according to the Financial Times is backed by Sheikh Sultan bin Jassim al-Thani of Qatar and other Qatari investors.
Forta chief executive Omran Al-Kuwari told the FT: “Caliber has demonstrated impressive growth in followers across its platforms, and we are investing for the long-term, as it is poised to take its next step.”
Beheshti told Press Gazette the investment would be used to invest in marketing for the first time and new products and services, including a paid consumer app called Sayso he envisions as “Apple News+ but for creators”.
Investing in growth has “delayed our journey towards profitability”, Beheshti said.
Last year he told Press Gazette they were set to get into profit “at some point in 2025”.
But he explained last week that they were “doubling down on some of these areas that we see as really important” and now expect to be “in the area of profitability” around the end of 2026 to the start of 2027.
The Caliber team is made up of 55 people, including 30 in New York (where Beheshti is based) and 25 in London. Of these 18 in New York and 11 in London are classed as journalists.
Beheshti does not expect much of the new investment to go on expanding the staff, although they are moving into new offices in both locations that he hopes will enable them to do more events such as hosting creators.
Caliber / The News Movement revenue seeing ‘huge growth’ compared to 2024
In the first six months of 2025, the company doubled its revenue generated in the whole of 2024, Beheshti said, adding that the trend of “huge growth” has continued into Q3.
Growth has come via native advertising on social platforms, such as a paid partnership with Skittle on The News Movement’s feeds last month to promote its work with Queer Britain,
“We’ve got a Youtube show which is sold out for host read leads through to the end of the year,” Beheshti added, referring to The Recount’s Margin of Error.
Beheshti said native advertising has been able to grow as a result of audience growth across Caliber’s brands and platforms, reaching more than 100 million people a month – about 65% of whom are under 35.
The News Movement’s combined social following across Tiktok, Youtube and Instagram is now just over a million, up 64% compared to last summer. Each of these platforms frequently recommends posts to people who have not specifically followed the page.
The creative studio business, now called The Caliber Collective, which creates digital campaigns for brands including Amazon, KFC and Planned Parenthood, has also seen revenue growth, Beheshti said.
Beheshti said he has been pleased to see “more and more is people within the organisation come up with ideas for how to create new products to be able to better monetise it”.
He cited a newsletter from The Recount that launched on Substack this month called Who Broke It to bring together views from creators across the US political spectrum.
The newsletter is bringing in subscription revenue to Caliber with people paying for subscriber-only chatting and the full archive.
Another new monetisation driver, Beheshti said, is working with US colleges to help build their offering to students to help “the next generation of creators”.
What is planned ‘Apple News+ for creators’ app Sayso?
Sayso, the planned new app, is expected to launch in beta this year and then officially in 2026.
Beheshti said it would be a paid-for app for consumers who want to “follow more deeply” a range of creators that have built relationships with Caliber.
He said these creators would continue to connect with their audiences on social platforms but “we think we can create a home for them where audiences can follow more deeply what they’re talking about”.
He added that Caliber would “personalise that experience for the audience so it fits in with the time that they’ve got. News is always kind of ‘give me five minutes to be able to understand the story’, whereas what we’ve demonstrated is actually stories can be broken down into smaller parts, and people can grasp and understand them.
“What we want to develop in this product Sayso is the ability to – you’ve only got one minute? We’ll give you a minute’s worth of great quality information from people that you trust. And then the monetisation returns money back to the creator so they’re making money directly from the content they create.”
Beheshti pointed to platforms like Patreon that have “demonstrated that people will pay when they connect with people that they trust to give them valuable information. So we think there’s an opportunity to create that specifically around news.”
Beheshti said Caliber’s team are “huge fans” of Substack which is also a home for many content creators – albeit usually with their own separate subscriptions. But he added: “What Substack don’t do that we’re offering is that curation. We are selecting creators to come onto this platform based on a set of values, not based on the fact that they cover news in the way that we cover news, but they have a certain set of values.”
Those “values” mean that the creators are “trying to report on facts and trying to do things in a way that you and I would recognise as being journalistically credible” rather than any political values.
He added: “And then the idea is that as a consumer, you can follow the creator, but you can also get a more holistic understanding of, well, hang on, what are people saying from this angle and that angle all in one place, rather than having to go from newsletter to newsletter to be able to understand it. So that’s how we see ourselves as being quite different.”
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