Since 2025, several social media platforms aimed at cutting through AI slop and misinformation have launched to better inform audiences that primarily get their news from social media.
But to get audiences to new platforms, they need creators. While many creators prioritize sharing accurate information with their audiences, the decision to join new platforms often includes several factors, including where the audiences they want to reach already are, whether the content format is similar to what they already make, revenue opportunities and their personal bandwidth.
Newdle, Newsreel and SaySo are examples of some new apps that all have different strategies for only allowing verified creators on their platforms, vetting content and presenting it in ways that keep people informed and even test their comprehension.
Jack Brewster, CEO and founder of Newsreel, formerly covered extremism, misinformation and AI online. Doing that work he realized there needed to be a home for journalists and subject matter experts on social media. That was where the idea for Newsreel began.
“I built this as an audience first problem,” Brewster said. “People feel overwhelmed with the current options in the world. But this is also a creator problem. AI is going to be worse and the scarce resource is going to be trust. You’re going to be competing with more and more content that is partially AI or wholly AI-generated and that’s a real problem.”
SaySo is striving to do something similar.
“The way that we think about SaySo is the world and the audiences we’re trying to reach are overwhelmed with information,” said Ramin Beheshti, CEO of Caliber that launched SaySo. “You go on social media and you don’t know who to trust, what’s real and what’s AI. Traditional news talks down to you. SaySo is meant to get rid of that overwhelm while keeping you informed.”
Newdle’s platform provides short, sourced video and text context to add deeper context for stories, instead of just aggregating headlines, and features private community groups where readers can discuss stories with family, friends or colleagues. Newsreel hopes to address the problem through vetted creators and journalists on social media, and interactive features like quizzes and streaks to draw in younger audiences. SaySo curates a personalized, fixed set of videos based on your interests, with people only needing to look once a day to be up on the news and not need to be endlessly scrolling on the app.
“I think we’re in a growth phase in this industry and there’s a lot of focus on quality of information and it is important as we have ‘classically trained journalists’ who have been through the newsroom culture and the newsroom whatever in real time training or even go to school and graduate with a degree or whatever mixing with all these sort of self-taught or self grown, self-starting information creators,” said News Creator Corps Collective member James Cave, who completed the fellowship in 2025. “It’s an interesting energy to prioritize the quality of information. And I think that these apps are an important signal that the industry itself is sort of trying to solve for these things.”
Jess Rauchberg, assistant professor at Seton Hall, said these apps are responding to “pay-to-play” social media where verification on many platforms can be bought, rather than be indicative of the person’s trustworthiness.
“I see Newdle and these different news reporting apps really emphasize these old school ideas of what social media verification is, but also the short-form content and gamification as responses to a larger attention economy,” Rauchberg said. “And this is how people want their news now. I think these apps are a way to maybe say, ‘What happens when we embrace these changes and we try to progress with what consumers want?’”
A big part of whether they will be successful, Rauchberg said, is whether they can provide a sufficient financial incentive for creators.
Krysten Stein, assistant professor at The University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College, said while she applauds these new platforms at trying to find better options on social media to find verifiable information, she thinks the priority should be trying to hold the existing large platforms accountable for the content shared on their platform.
“I feel like we already have enough platforms,” Stein said. “I think we need to hold the platforms that we have accountable to being ethical and to their design flaws and when they say, ‘We can’t content moderate things that are verifiable or we can’t fact check.’ I just don’t know if creating more and more platforms is just another band-aid rather than actually holding big tech accountable.”
While Cave thinks it’s important that these apps are entering the industry, right now joining them doesn’t make sense for him for a few reasons.
The first is that Cave’s audience is primarily based in a rural part of New York, and they are not likely to be early adopters of new apps. Cave also noted that in general, he’s been trying to move more towards mediums where he “owns” versus “rents” distribution channels.
“And these platforms will always be rented, right?” Cave said. “You’re going to use them as a distribution channel, hopefully as one of those you could look at as the higher part of the funnel, the discovery, but you never really own it.”
Cave said that’s why he’s been spending the past year focusing more on newsletter and podcast production because he can own those channels, and if he needs to move from those platforms, he can retain his data and audience and make that transition more seamless.
Stein said that creators need to think beyond early growth when choosing platforms.
“Who owns the audience?” she said. “Will their followers be terrible to export, or will they move with them? Is monetization sustainable? How are creators actually compensated on that platform? Is it a stable business model? And then, will it diversify their platform presence or are they just doing more labor to not be compensated?”
Stein also said it’s important for new platforms to be more transparent than existing ones about moderation and algorithms.
In contrast, journalist Isabel Ravenna, who predominantly posts via her newsletter and vertical video platforms, says she sees the benefit in cross-posting her vertical video content everywhere.
“Beehiv, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, YouTube,” Ravenna said. “I try to do all of them. Every time I post to TikTok and my newsletter separately. But as far as online posts, if it’s a shorter video, I’lll try to go from TikTok, to Instagram, to Youtube Shorts and SaySo.”
She spends less time on Facebook, but when she does upload videos there, she said she’s met with a lot of misinformation. Ravenna said she still thinks it’s worth posting there, though.
“I think in the beginning, when I first started posting, it was mostly to reach more people with my newsletter,” Ravenna said. “That was the goal at first and I suppose it still was. I had more of a strategy. On Instagram, I had planned to share more graphics and clips and resharing things and occasional commentary. I made them coincide with my vertical video content on TikTok. But I just didn’t have the time, so I decided to just cross-post everywhere. But because of the nature of my work, I feel every platform is worth using, even if it’s an audience that doesn’t think your information is worth hearing.”
Someone from SaySo’s team reached out to Ravenna last year, looking for a handful of news creators for beta testing and offered to pay. For Ravenna, who says she doesn’t do a lot of ads or paid collaborations in general to maintain her journalistic independence and integrity, the funding of SaySo and its parent company Caliber made her feel like she could make an exception.
Ravenna started posting on SaySo in January, and since then the platform has evolved with feedback from her and the other testers.
“I really like to include all my sources, and something I really like about SaySo that makes me root for it, other than being one of the founding creators, is you can hyperlink all your sources in short-form videos, which is how it would work when you were reading an article,” Ravenna said. “You can click the links and decide if something is being misrepresented or get more context.”
Ravenna also appreciates that all her videos on SaySo undergo review before posting. More controversial topics undergo human review, similar to a process of editing in a newsroom. Right now the review process may be a little slow for breaking news, but that might change as the app scales up in size. She also said that SaySo’s vetting of which creators can post sets it apart from TikTok and Instagram – and she likes that feature, though she would like to better understand the vetting process and standards.
“I’m not reaching many people there because it’s so new,” Ravenna said. “I do see the follower counts growing, but not seeing much engagement. It’s a difficult thing when you launch an app and expect people to join and add it to their routine. But I do imagine that the people who are there and follow me there are coming from my existing audience and other creators’ on the app.”
Launching a new app is a chicken-and-egg problem, Brewster said. “You have to build up the audience to get the creators and build the creators to get the audience.”
Then the question becomes: How do new apps incentivize creators to come on board and bring their audiences?
Brewster said Newsreel is experimenting with revenue sharing with its creators. The platform has signed AI licensing deals, contracts with libraries and schools throughout the country and plans to bring more direct-to-consumer opportunities too. The platform’s creators will be able to share some of the revenue from these deals with the platform, and Newsreel won’t take a cut of the direct-to-consumer opportunities like other platforms do with merchandise sales, premium subscriptions, and more.
Getting audiences on a new platform is the hardest part, Brewster said. “Getting people to believe in the mission is very easy. They know the problem. But they’ll only care about it when their friends are on it.”
He’s leaning into building networks via creators, schools and libraries to get those audiences.
Beheshti said SaySo’s approach is creating a place where creators who want to produce information-focused work and news can invest in a platform that treats them well. Caliber Media has offices in London and New York that can help facilitate partnership opportunities to benefit its creators. For example, when SaySo launched in the UK, Caliber put a creator from the UK on stage at South by Southwest, which was huge exposure for them.
“We haven’t needed to do much else,” he said. “Since it’s launched we’ve had more inbound requests from people wanting to join as creators. We are out there trying to get big names and maybe we’ll see if that needs a different approach, but at the moment, we’ve largely gotten who we’ve gone after.”
Beheshti said another goal of the platform is to help creators make money from their content, though the platform isn’t quite there yet. The idea is that everyone could consume a digest for free, but SaySo would charge for certain parts of the platform and that money would go back to creators. For example, if someone wanted to private message creators or wanted a second or a more focused digest.
He said the platform’s audience growth has already surpassed his trajectory.
“We haven’t had millions of people, but what we have proven is that when people download and sign up, they stay with it,” Beheshti said.
Rauchberg said it’s still too soon to tell how successful these apps will be at getting people to join them and dedicate time to them. It’s also still unclear whether they will help bring more accurate information to people who aren’t already discerning news and information consumers.
“I think now the attention economy has really aggregated around this idea of convenience that you just need one app to do everything and that becomes really complicated when these apps and platforms might not be the best way to share news and share information,” Rauchberg said. “I mean it’s really hard to leave the ‘Meta cinematic universe’ when they’ve got an arm in every corner of digital communications.”
Stein said it will be interesting to see who ends up on these platforms and how self-selecting the audiences may be for apps that specifically offer news, whether “it’s somebody who’s just seeking out news or somebody who’s like, ‘This is a new platform. I just want to try it.’”
News Creator Corps Collective member Kahja Elliott, who completed the fellowship in 2025, currently posts on Instagram, Substack, LinkedIn, Threads and has a podcast.
She started on Instagram, expanded to a podcast, then went to Threads, then Substack and then LinkedIn.
“I like to think about it in terms of what audience am I trying to reach and where am I currently not able to reach them,” Elliott said when explaining how she decides what platforms to show up on.
Instagram was the first place she showed up as a creator, but if she wanted to talk to her audience more, she needed to use other platforms.
“I knew some people would find me via the podcast and want to put a face to my voice, so Instagram and podcast complemented each other. If I wanted them to feel like they were getting to know me on another level, Instagram made that easier with Threads. This is where the Instagram people get to use their whole personality. This is where you can be quippy, sarcastic, politically astute.”
Elliott said she tried TikTok, but found it duplicitous to Instagram.
“I had more passerbies without deep engagement,” she said. “If you’re going after more numbers, maybe TikTok.”
SaySo also reached out to Elliott at the end of last year, but the volume of content they wanted didn’t make sense with her strategy,
“What I do at Kay in the Bay isn’t relying on inundating audiences with a volume of content, but more about reaching people with relevant content,” she said. “SaySo wanted lots of content and I get it because it operates like its own newsfeed, but editing video takes a lot of time. How much bandwidth do I have and how much does this platform require me to show up and to what degree?”
Elliott said she pays attention to platforms where she subscribes and participates as an audience member to see if her brand Kay in the Bay can sit on that platform. She looks at what kind of content is on those platforms and how audiences participate.
She also looks at other creators in the food and food media space to see whether they are talking to similar markets, engaging in similar verticals, etc. She does exercises to think of the avatars of people who she wants to engage with her content and sees whether they exist on that platform.
“I use those as guidelines to see what is already landing for someone and see how to adapt that,” she said. If there aren’t that many of her desired audience consuming content similar to hers on a specific platform, then maybe “the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.”
“The good thing is these platforms are still all free, particularly if you are not a creator with a huge mega following,” Elliott said. “Sometimes having smaller numbers allows you a certain level of agility to test without millions or thousands of eyes on you as you test. There is no issue with going onto these platforms as a litmus test and you don’t have to stay if it doesn’t work.”
Despite her hesitation that these platforms will get traction with audiences, Stein still applauds the efforts of their founders.
“People are thinking about this,” she said. “They’re having conversations about it. We are thinking about mis- and disinformation. We are thinking about platforms. We’re thinking about all these things and we’re trying to envision different futures. And I think that is very human and a very good thing.”