Will: I have with me today, Sam Anthony, who is the founder of yournews.com a channel where anyone can post news from around the world and it's not censored, anyone of course can then view that news from anywhere that they are filtered down to a local level. Here today to discuss the concept and the creation is Sam. Anthony. Thanks for joining us. Sam: Thank you for having me, Will. I'm excited to be here very much. Will: So I stumbled across yournews.com just a couple weeks ago. Some, one of our people in our organization let me know about it. I hadn't heard of it. So we went ahead and we signed up for an account and I've actually gotten my assistant, Shawna, I've told her to start posting to it. Now the coolest thing about this, from my perspective, you've got people, the potential for people to be posting news from around the world and it's not censored. Beyond reason, of course. You're not letting people put up snuff films, the sort of thing that anybody would consider to be reasonable. No, we're not gonna have that on there. It's not news, but anything else, no censorship, people can post what they want and people can read what they want. Where did you get this idea from? Sam: So about a little more than 20 years ago myself and a couple of friends got together and we believe that the print newspaper was eventually gonna be gone replaced by the web. Right? And so this was back in 2001 and. Nobody bought that story. Nobody would even buy it. And like I said today, nobody doesn't buy that story. It's happening as you, we're amazed they're even in business still. So we set out to build a platform that would ultimately replace the daily paper and keep in mind two of us were bankers. One guy was a coder. We really had no idea what we're doing, we've had to figure it out. So there was a lot of trial and error. It's not like I come from the media space, so we had to figure it out. We made. We made a lot of good decisions, but it's like anything else, when you don't know what you're doing you're trying to get somewhere, we must have hit every road bump. And ultimately we ended up failing. I lost a couple of partners. I had to pick up a new one and then we built a different platform and this kind of solved the problems that we had. But the whole trick to this game was the local news reporting. And maybe some of the audience doesn't know this, but if you don't, I'll fill you in. The problem that newspapers face is that there's no money in web ads. There's nothing local works. Facebook wouldn't work for one city. Okay. LinkedIn too, everything is global. So if you had to place a bet, the future of news is gonna be one global media giant. Here's the problem. The problem is what market are you in? You're are you in Ontario? Where are you? Will: I'm in Alberta. I'm in Western Canada. Sam: Oh, okay. So if you and I decided to start a news organization, the first thing we -- local. The first thing we do is need local news reporters.  How many people do you think it would take to cover that market completely? And I don't know the size of the market. I'm in Palm Beach, County, Florida, and it's five counties and I'm guessing 2 million people. So we probably need 500 people. Will: But in Calgary- we area city of a million people. And I would say that if you wanted to do a decent job of news coverage in this city, you're gonna need at least 10 reporters out there on the street every day. Sam: Okay. But what about for the high school sports?   Will: Yeah. If you wanna start getting down that far, we're talking right now, you need a hundred of them. Sam: Okay. That's my point. So if you and I had to do this in every market in America, let's talk about New York, LA, Chicago, Miami, you're talking bigger markets. I, we would spend a fortune. So the original model that we did was in The States, we have the network TV stations like Fox, CBS, ABC, and NBC. And then they have local Fox, CBS ABC affiliates across the United States. So what we did was we licensed our digital property to people that owned broadcast stations that had local news departments and the advantage they had if you know anything about broadcast you're broadcasting with a signal, right? So in my market, the TV DMA runs from Boca Raton to Sebastian, which is like an hour 45 minutes. So whenever you're watching on that network, you're in Boca an hour, 45 minutes, you're watching. And then if you have a radio signal, I don't need to tell you if it goes 50 miles in each direction, it's the same people that are listening. The value prop that we had was number one, it gave the broadcast stations, a competitive advantage against the newspaper because they became a daily. The second piece is it attracted a completely different customer base that would never buy their stations, which is like 99% of the businesses because nobody drives five counties over to get a piece of pizza, right? So it's hyper local because we have an ad model that can drill down its granular as one zip code or as broad as nationwide. So we ended up there's 200 markets in the United States and we got I think 101, 102 up and running, and these guys were providing all the local news, which was really, I thought it was a brilliant idea, but then what happened was some of the stations started falling off and calling me and I said what's wrong? And they said we have to drop off because we let our news director go by the way, the first gotta go. As the news director, wanna know why? Cause they're giving 'em about 40 or 45,000 a year and it's strictly a cost and they could replace 'em with music and save 45 grand. So what happened was they started to, ad revenues started to shrink cuz as well as I do, there's no legacy media, that's expanding. They're all contracting right. That all of 'em. And so I talked to a few of these guys and they were telling me that, their radio stations which had 30 people when they signed up with me or down to 10 or 15 employees that they're working with to do the same job. I said what's going on? So one, one of the guys says do you listen to radio? I go, no, I got Sirius radio in the car. He goes, so does everybody else. Okay. He says in the older generation may listen, but the younger generation listens to their, they put the things in their ears with their phones. And so I started thinking about it. I go to the gym every day and I'm looking at every, I'm like the only person that doesn't have the earpieces in. And I'm looking at all of them and all of them are listening to music on their phones and I went, oh my God. So I have a business that I've got a hundred customers and all of my customers have cancer. They're all gonna be gone. So I said this is gonna be a problem. Think about it. So what I had to do was then figure out what is the solution to this, because how are we gonna get local news reporting and how are we gonna do this everywhere? And how are you gonna be able to afford it? Because like I said, if you and I had to fund a news operation in every city in the world, we would go broke. It's like Uber, if they had to pay every driver 50,000 a year, they wouldn't be able to do it. So I was dealing with somebody from where was it called? It was Turning Point USA. I dunno if you're familiar with the organization, Charlie Kirk and they were talking about the chapters they had, and we were talking about having their local chapters or their people being able to be news reporters. And then I started thinking what if we were able to pay them a percentage of the ads that appear around their story? And by the way, if you ever laid up at night, you can't sleep. And all of a sudden you get this epiphany. Okay. So I'm, I'll never forget it because I get up in bed and I. Oh my God, this is gonna work. So I had to go run some financial models to see if it was gonna work. Okay. To see if money can be made but the bottom line is I, it is the model that we ended up  building out, is the Uber model for news. So we had completely took the website and replaced it with a different one where the, you know how with Uber, if you drive the cab, you get a there's a taxi fair. And then the Uber driver gets a percentage of the taxi fair. The way our ad model now works is the journalist can be set up as a paid journalist. And what they do is when they submit an article and they share the article on social media, because they want everybody to click on it. Every time it opens, it becomes a cash register for them, and this is how they make money. So now, if you think of the United States in terms of the scale, because this is a model that could be scaled across the globe, the United States has 200 markets, roughly. I don't remember the exact number, there's 20,000 cities here in 3,300 counties. So what I'm guesstimating is in terms of local news reporting, you're probably gonna have about 5 people, a city I'm got, you're -- New York's gonna need more obviously. And you're gonna have some areas that need less, but five people a city's a hundred thousand news reporters and that's just for local news, then you're gonna have the national news. And remember I'm not, I'm a daily newspaper. So I'm sports, business, politics, entertainment, world, I'm lifestyle, I'm home and garden, food and wine travel. I'm golf, soccer, hockey. I got everything, so I'm the one stop shop for everything. This is you're gonna need the national news reporters, but then you can get into content like influencers, content creators like yourself, right? Where people who have podcasts that set up an account. So this becomes ancillary revenue and yours type of stuff could go fall under world news. It could go under opinion depending on how the content is aired. Or how about somebody that does golf videos or writes about golf stories that has, 200,000 followers on social media that could, ...goes in our golf section and advertisers will be able to target around specific content that's relevant to them. So if you have a chef, that's writing a story or putting up a video in the food and wine section, he's gonna share it with people that follow him. And there's certainly not gonna be any -- Titlest is not gonna wanna run an ad around that content. It's gonna be somebody who sells wine or whatever it is. What we figured out was the future of news is gonna be one global media giant. Local news reporting is gonna be the Uber model or YouTube model for news, whatever you wanna call it, where the journalists get a percentage of the ads that appear around their story, where what you need is in this business is you need a model that has scale. So like Facebook has scale they're global, right? So they could run an ad to one zip code anywhere across the globe. So in our case, our current market is the United States. But once we get this dialed in a little bit, then we could take it and I can open up Canada. I can open up, Great Britain, France and you can start opening up. So this is global scale, but the model, imagine if Facebook had a model that it was a news reporting agency and they do a couple billion, let's say a quarter in the United States. Imagine a third of that money being pushed to the journalists. Now you're talking about a financial model, which puts the journalist back to 20 years ago, the money they used to make. Will: And of course it incentivizes the journalist to report well, because otherwise nobody's gonna watch their stuff. Sam: Exactly right. So the future of news is gonna be online. There's no question. It's gonna be one. This is my prediction. One place where everybody can contribute and everybody can have a voice. Now we can start getting into the whole legacy media and the fact that nobody believes them anymore. Like you said, I think a third are the people in Canada. So you're wondering which who are these third in the United States. I think we're down to 10. I'm like, I don't even know anybody that buys their story anymore, so it's really getting nuts. So here's the good news for us. They're putting themselves out of business. We don't have to worry, first of all, they're done anyway. Okay. Because it's an antiquated product. Nobody believes in that there's freedom of press anymore. Agreed? Will: Absolutely. Sam: Okay. Our product puts the power of the press back in the hands of the people and gives 'em their freedom back. Will: You had mentioned when you were talking about where this whole idea came from, that you and a group of other people started this back in 2001, but you and I were talking before the interview, that was of when the concept came along and you went through various iterations of it. Oh, okay. The current form of it, I think you say has only been in place for about seven years. So say about 2015? Sam: Yes, but this model has been only in place for about four, five weeks. Will: Yeah, but where I'm going with, this is how many readers do you have? How many followers do you have? Sam: Last year, we had 5,600,000 something odd thousand people read around 51 million articles. Will: There's a huge demand out there for what you're doing. Sam: Okay. And you're correct, but also. Not for nothing but everything mainstream media is doing is helping us because people are seeking out alternative news. And we are an alternative news website. I just happen to be granular right down to one city. I can post somebody's high school football game or somebody's little league game. Okay. But what's happening is even though we hate it, it's really helping the cause. Okay. How long could you lie before people just don't believe you anymore? And so then they start looking elsewhere. Will: You're right. Mainstream media is dying all on their own, but let's get them a little push out the door. And replace it with something like what you're doing, where people can go out there and they can access any news that they want, that's uncensored and yeah, could be local. It could be subject based. Nobody has an agenda when they're sending them that information. Sam: You're correct. But keep in mind, mine is way broader than what you do. You're niche, right? So in my case, ultimately I have a vision of how this is gonna run and the vision is gonna be we'll use the United States, but then you could just replicate it anywhere is you have 200 markets in the United States. At some point in time, like right now we just, I'm doing test marketing with news reporters like yourself to see what the buy-in is and then who my customer would be. And in a lot of cases, I think it's really the younger generation because these are the kids coming outta school, looking for work. And they don't really have, they're staying with mom and dad and they don't have the overhead. They're able to be able to do things more than somebody like me or you, which has got big overhead. And we need to, we need to, have a higher paying job. These are also, the kids are the ones that really understand the internet. You have the older generation and I'm not saying you don't okay, but you have the older generation, like my mother and father who still get the paper, but then my kid gets everything right here on the phone. I'm holding it up. So that's the next generation. These are the people that, if I'm successful, this will be the pay model for all of them. Will: And what about moving forward as a future plan, setting up something where people can sign up for alerts on particular subjects or geographically centered articles so that they would be alerted when these things come up? Sam: That's something that has to be put in place. This thing is probably gonna take a billion plus over time to scale across the globe. It's things like what you're talking about is gonna be an app and that app is gonna have alerts and people are gonna be to say I want sports related content, or I want business, or yes. All that stuff needs to be built. Also, if you notice Silicon Valley has funded all the tech giants. They have, right? Twitter or Facebook and they pick and choose. And I know this game because I come from that background. So you have to be part of the good old boys club, which I'm not, neither are you. So these guys are never gonna fund me. So I have to circumvent them, go around them, which I'm gonna do simply because I just don't quit until I get it done. However, those are the guys with the real big bread that could come in, dress it up and put, just start with a hundred million and then start bringing in money as they need it and get it dressed up for Morgan Stanley to take it public. That would be nice. We won't have that luxury because those guys ain't playing with me. Will: But of the investors that you have approached and I'm sure that you've given them your spiel talked about how you're trying to create this news service that's uncensored that people can get the truth. They can get whatever kind of news they want in their area. What's been the investors response to that. How do they feel about, yeah, basically trying to work towards taking out mainstream media and replacing them with something else? Sam: The people I'm talking to, I've tapped into a good place where, there's some very affluent people and those people are all conservatives and those people really want this to happen. The, these guys got a lot of money, so right now what I'm doing is they've, as I say it, they've bought lottery tickets from me, oh, it's like a cute little toy, but they put some money in. So right now, what I'm doing is I'm creating demand and I'm proving the model out.  Like I told you, I had, how many readers last year. 5.6 to 5.7 million, something like that.  So I already get a lot of traffic. That traffic is easy for me because everybody who posts, shares, think of it this way. The way the news business works on a local level. News is generated in the form of press releases by people like the mayor's office, schools, non-profits, and they send a press release to the media. Doesn't matter if for where you are, or, if I'm in, Palm Beach County or Miami or Chicago. News organizations are aggregators. Okay. And then they decide what they're gonna air or print. 99% of it goes in the garbage. Primary, the primary reason is because newspapers are limited in space. You can't print everybody's opinion and radio and TV, they only have, limited amount of time. Okay. But they aggregate everything. So what I am is an aggregator everywhere. And because of the scale --you've used CraigsList before, if you haven't, you know what it is, you know how you can't send Craig a email asking him to post something, right? You gotta go there and post it yourself. In our case, you have any idea how many people send, press releases to the media every day. It's an astronomical number. I don't even know how many there are, but I don't want a million emails in my inbox. So the way it works is people set up accounts. They post. The content comes in the dashboard, is pending review, and then once approved, they get an email with a direct link to their story, and you wanna know what everybody does. They open the article and they share it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, if you don't believe me, I can assure you if somebody posts their kids little league game in Schaumburg, Illinois, there's a 100% chance grandma and grandpa are gonna see that on Facebook. It's just the way it works. So I think of me as Facebook for news powered by not only broadcast stations, but local news reporters who are sharing their stuff on social media. So that's what I'm saying. The magic formula for any social site is content equals readership. Once you've aggregated all the content the game's over. It's over. You get all the readers. What it's not gonna get you is the bank robbery, the car crash, city council meeting, the high school football game. It's not gonna get you the hard news. That's where the news journalists come in. So in essence, where, everybody knows that, you, in order to have, a government that you know is contained you really need local news reporting, right? You need journalists that are investigative that could come up with stuff or they could, they could find out all the crimes that are being committed because it ain't gonna be the police that defines it. It's usually the journalist that finds out rights, the story, and next thing there's arrest. Right? So all of that is going away. What I'm doing is breathing life back into that industry. Will: And I think there's actually an idea struck me as you were talking about this, it opens the door much wider, I think, to the independent journalists, because you've got the ones who it's a full-time job for them. And yes they're prolific, they're producing stuff every day, but there's also, part-timers out there. Who's got their regular day job, but they also, to do news reporting of some kind it could be any, anything, and it gives them the opportunity to not only do this but possibly to monetize it and put a little extra money in their pocket, an incentive to be putting that information out there for people. And, they still got their day job, but now their hobby just turned into something. That's informing people and putting a little money in their pocket while they're at it. And that's a model that's just not gonna happen under the mainstream media. Either you've got a full time, full-time reporter, who's being paid a full-time salary or you get nothing. There’s no in between. Sam: By the way go to any network TV station, both local or national, and you can't post a thing, at least in the states, you can't Fox, CBS, ABC, they don't want, they don't want your opinion. They don't want an event. They don't want anything. Will: The most you're gonna be able to do here in Canada is you might be able to post a comment. And if they don't like your comment, it'll never show up. Sam: In my case, I have the high school football game. I have the local news, right? I have your kids little league games. So the reason I'm telling you this is you can't go to Fox news if you live in Arkansas and see the high school football game, you gotta come to me. So it's the user generated content that drives the eyeballs. That's where I'm telling you once you've aggregated all the, believe me, how many people in the United States do you think if they knew I would publish their stuff would send it to me? Everybody. Whoever does that is the next Rupert Murdoch of the media space. So that's the easy part. The next step is the news reporting and that's where people like you come in. Okay. That's where people like the local news reporter and with the national, but there's so many different topics. So it's sports business, politics, entertainment, world, U.S., and then how many countries? So this is a massive undertaking. I think we could pull this off to become a behemoth with the proper funding over the next 10 years. We can turn this into a global media giant. Will: So Sam, I have to ask a question and I know would be going through the minds of some of my viewers and my viewers here are very much conservatives, people who are in favor of uncensored information being provided. However, we also have, a sense of decency. We don't want to be seeing instructions on how to build a car bomb. So how are you filtering that kind of stuff out? Sam: So when somebody posts a story, it comes in as pending review. Now the current model is we have a national editor currently, but eventually what's gonna happen is each market is gonna have one or more editors. Those are the people that control the content, okay, that comes in, because think about it. If you had, 80,000 submissions today, who in the hell is gonna be able to read it all. So this is where you're gonna need editors. Also, you have the journalists that write the stories. The editors have to know how to run a news department, cuz number one, you can't have five people writing about the high school football game. So at some point in time, they need to be assigned and everybody has to have certain things that they're tasked with. Also, you're gonna have all the user generated content, the PR firms, the nonprofits posting events. Somebody has to look at all the stuff and approve it and that's gonna be the editor. So there's always eyeballs on something. We have an editor that blows a gasket, probably. Who knows, okay, you'll just have to delete his account but for the most part, the whole model has been thought through completely it's gonna go right down to where you have national editors. And by the way, the pay model for the editors, which was brilliant. I have to tell you that the gentleman who built my technology actually came up with this one is the editors get a percentage of the ads off of every article they approve. So think about that. So if you're in a market like New York or Chicago, and you've got 500 submissions this week, every time they approve that story, the content goes back to the nonprofit or the whoever posted it. They share it on social media and every time that thing opens, it becomes a cash register for them. Honestly, I think these people are gonna make a fortune off of this. Will: And obviously they're not going to approve things that you know, could be BS or offensive because those aren't gonna be paying money. First of all. And secondly, because most of them will have, some kind of moral filter. They’re gonna look at that and go, no, that's not appropriate content. So, I think you've had a very good model here where you're putting this into the hands of the people to report to the people. And I know that you're somebody who has probably, or not probably-- certainly been thinking about the evils of legacy media much longer than I have. I've been in this fight for two years now. You've been at this for over 20. So if you had some parting thoughts for our audience on that subject of how we need to put the power of information back into the hands of the people, what would they be? Sam: The parting thought here would be that the legacy media is gonna be gone anyway. So for anybody that you know is concerned about it, don't worry. It's it's like the horse and buggy doesn't exist anymore. Give it another five to 10 years. They're gonna be gone. It's gonna be replaced by either my product or somebody who copies it exactly. What we don't want is for them to copy this. The problem that they're gonna have is if, like I had a friend of mine that was running CBS 12, by the way, I just saw him out the other day. They let him go. Okay. Because not because he did something wrong, it's just, again, they're contracting and not expanding. He was disgusted at the fact that I allow people to post stuff to my site. And I said, Bob, you are an idiot. Okay. And you're an idiot. That's never gonna get it. It's not about quality control. The public wants this. You've gotta allow 'em to do it. And if you don't do it, they're gonna go somewhere else. So they come to me and then I get all the traffic. What do I care if somebody posts their kids' little league game and it shows up just in Boca Raton, in sports, right? I It doesn't matter. Will: The market will decide the viewership. Sam: Thank you. Okay. And it's really, the legacy media eventually will be gone. It will be replaced by a product like what I have either me or somebody else. What we plan, what I wanna do is I wanna bring back journalism, back the way it was 30 or 40 years ago, where the journalist reported the facts. It didn't matter your opinion. Okay. And there was no buy offs from the politicians who could buy you off, and, they could, they had an agenda and now you're promoting their agenda. This is gonna be a news organization. That's run by the people and for the people. That's how I see this playing out. So it's either gonna be me or somebody else. The good news is the legacy media, they ain't allowing anybody to post anything. So the good news is they ain't gonna wanna copy what we do. Here's what they're gonna wanna do. Facebook, once we start building this and it starts to get critical mass, these are guys that are gonna wanna come acquire me. And the reason I say that is because number one, we can take each local market, the local news feed, and you could upload that in an RSS feed to go to those people. And now they have the reporting side across the country, and then they could scale it across the globe. The problem is you don't want that guy having this kind of power because remember information is power. He who controls all the information, has all the power. This needs to be something – and I come from an investment banking background and I'm not a big fan of public companies. I think it's the worst thing to do. Cause now you're getting into regulation and all this crap, but I honestly believe this is a product that needs to be owned by the people. So this product needs to be put in the hands of the people where they actually can own it. So the media will be owned by everyone. Will: Excellent thought Sam: That's my vision on this. Yeah. Will: Sam, thank you for what you've built. I think it's a fantastic model. I think it's yes, this is the future of media and of information. I hope that when the day comes, when you do sell it to somebody, let's hope it's somebody like Elon Musk who's not going to know to censor the information that gets put out there. So thank you again, Sam, for your thoughts, for what you've done and folks as always, there will be a link to yournews.com directly underneath this interview on our. Sam: Awesome. Thanks. For having me, I appreciate it. Thanks.