When The News Movement launched in 2021, its mission was ambitious: to create a newsroom on social media for Gen Z. Given the high rates of news avoidance amongst 18-24-year-olds who rarely directly access news publisher homepages, and the volatility of social media algorithms, the strategy could be considered risky.
But Kamal Ahmed, The News Movement’s founder and editor-in-chief, attended conferences far and wide to promote the start-up’s mission to reach the next generation of news consumers.
It would have come as a surprise to many when Ahmed left the company and joined The Telegraph in May this year. His departure came not long after Press Gazette reported job cuts were taking place and fellow co-founders, William Lewis and Eleanor Breen, left for The Washington Post.
Press Gazette sat down with Ahmed’s successor as editor, Rebecca Hutson, and The News Movement’s new chief executive, co-founder Ramin Beheshti, at their London HQ to find out where the company is today.
Kamal Ahmed’s departure from The News Movement ‘really sad’
“I was really sad,” said Hutson of Ahmed’s departure. “I came here to work with him, but it looks like he is doing really well… we’re happy to see him happy, and when you love someone, you let them go.”
After Ahmed left, an editorial restructuring took place in late 2023 that saw Hutson become editorial director.
According to The News Movement’s most up-to-date accounts for the year 2022 it had net debt of £2.3m and 16 staff.
“We’re growing as fast as we did last year,” said Beheshti. “We’re going to beat the revenue we did last year, and that will mean we’re well on the path to profitability. All things remaining equal, we’ll be there at some point in 2025.”
Beheshti said Ahmed remains a “proud shareholder” in The News Movement. The same was reported of Lewis by The Washington Post.
The News Movement newsroom ‘immunised’ from having to generate revenue
As a social-first publisher, audience engagement is central to The News Movement’s growth. At the time of writing, it has 617,700 followers across Tiktok, Instagram and Youtube, a figure that grew by 200,000 between December 2023 to June. Views across these platforms increased from 131 million to 202 million between March and June, the publisher said.
Social-first publishers rely on their engagement to earn revenue from ad share, but The News Movement is different. “Obviously there is revenue that comes in from social media platforms,” said Hutson, “but that is a pretty erratic way of forecasting for business.”
For Beheshti, “the challenges of companies that have built businesses that just rely on social media revenue is when that social media revenue changes, they lose a chunk of their revenue”.
To avoid this vulnerability, The News Movement uses its growing audience to collect data that then informs brands on how to engage Gen Z.
“We’re publishing hundreds of videos a month, so we learn lots about how people engage with content online… [which] helps us deliver messages for brands,” said Hutson. “The commercial team is out there sharing our approach to social-first storytelling to brands that want to reach audiences like ours.”
Four commercial hires were made this year, which Hutson attributed to growing demand for access to The News Movement’s audience data.
Beheshti added: “We’ve worked with some huge organisations to tell stories on their platforms. Some of that has been from a reputation perspective, some of it has been to help them build a community and build knowledge and understanding, and some of it has been to help convert prospects into customers. And we’ve done it in the consultancy space, in the e-commerce space, in the financial sector.”
“What is really neat about this business,” added Hutson, “is that the newsroom is kind of immunised from having to generate revenue. Most commercial news organisations don’t have that privilege.”
How The News Movement reaches a ‘news-adjacent’ audience
But to activate this commercial arm of The News Movement, its editorial strategy must be fine-tuned to continually engage Gen Z users.
“In September last year we refocused our news coverage around life and style, sex and relationships, and arts and culture, because they are the prisms through which our audience views the world,” said Hutson.
The News Movement’s coverage of the Paris Olympics, where it stationed two journalists, offers a case in point. Features ranged from an interview with the co-founder of Pride House, a safe space at the Olympics for LGBTQ+ athletes and visitors, to an interview with Team GB’s youngest track and field athlete.
The News Movement also posts frequent explainers. “We probably do an explainer, between the London and New York office, once a day,” said Hutson. An explainer on Project 2025, a radical conservative manifesto linked with a potential Donald Trump presidency, currently has 3.4 million views on Tiktok.
“During the UK election campaign, one of our most popular videos was ‘what is a general election?’ We have to remember we’re trying to reach a news-adjacent audience,” Hutson continued.
“For many of our audience, it was their first general election. Not only have they not necessarily voted, but they also haven’t seen how existing media covers election campaigns and how it’s lots of set piece interviews and pool visits and TV debates. So we wanted to find a levity where we could get the issues that matter to our audience on the agenda.”
One way Hutson and her team achieved this was by placing more attention on Youtube. “So we had a series called The Takeaway, where we went and interviewed politicians about the stuff that matters to our audience. So like, how are you going to protect me from my landlord? And like, what are my rights? When am I ever going to be able to own a house?”
By the end of June, The News Movement increased its reach on Youtube by 91%, compared to the end of March. Its Youtube channel currently has 115,000 subscribers.
Although The News Movement’s commercial arm may insulate its journalism from the financial pressures of being social first, reaching and engaging audiences remains vital.
Managing the platforms, or ‘unreliable boyfriends’
When he was editor-in-chief, Ahmed described the platforms as “unreliable boyfriends”. This is a term Hutson still uses to capture the opaqueness around their decision-making on what content gets prioritised.
“I think Meta and Tiktok are figuring out how they want news on their platforms,” she said. “That’s why we kind of call ourselves a movement, because we want to figure that out with them.”
The News Movement maintains its relationship with the platforms partly through meetings and quarterly reviews, where Hutson and her team can “quiz” them on their plans.
Beheshti said the experience “varies depending on the platform, if I’m honest. I think some of them would rather they didn’t have any news on their platform, Meta being one. So we get varying degrees of interaction.
“Snapchat have been a fantastic partner. Youtube have been good. Tiktok have really good intentions. I think Meta, they went through periods of pro-news, so it really does vary.”
As CEO, is Beheshti worried about Tiktok changing its algorithm, or even the US banning the platform?
“Our revenues aren’t particularly tied to Tiktok per se,” he said. “People’s thirst for news would go somewhere else and we’ll put news on that. But from a revenue perspective, it doesn’t make a material impact.”
‘There are a lot of people in this space now and I want us to have the edge on them’
Being able to feed its commercial arm with audience data is a central pillar of The News Movement’s strategy. But increasingly, social media is becoming crowded with competitors looking to mine its target audience.
“There are a lot of people in this space now and I want us to have the edge on them,” said Hutson. “I want us to have that credibility in the language and the conversations that we’re trying to have. I want us to be the newsbrand that you get street cred for sharing to your Instagram story. I want us to be whip smart and really funny and a bit knowing. And sometimes we’re not that nice, like we’re good, but we can be a bit arch and a bit kind of wry. And I think we are developing that tone.”
For Beheshti: “I think it relies on what other products and services are you in need of and how can we help bring that to you? There will be smaller groups of people that we’ve built a large audience who will want to go deeper on subjects.”
But would paywalled content be a red line? “No. I think there’s opportunities where you create niches that people will pay for deeper content. But relying on that as your only source of revenue is not what we’re about. We want to reach as many people as possible, and that doesn’t mean necessarily putting [content] behind any kind of paywall…
“I think for us, the huge potential is this: how do we tap into the audience more and help them achieve what they need?”
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