Welcome to our third installment of Press Pass, our once-a-month behind-the-scenes look at Tangle. With media trust at an all-time low, we’re giving our audience an unprecedented peek behind the curtain at the challenges we’re facing, the decisions we're making, and how we’re building an ethical news brand.
What we’ve been up to.
From 2015 to 2021, I was working at a media company called A Plus, founded by the actor and angel investor Ashton Kutcher. The early days of A Plus were a glorious stampede of pageviews and advertising dollars and success. I got to work shoulder-to-shoulder with a celebrity and entrepreneur, we had CEOs from the tech world building out forward-looking infrastructure, and best of all, we were doing something good: creating a news organization focused on solutions journalism; on the people solving big problems, not the people causing them.
I was one of the first full-time editorial hires, and as a 20-something reporter who loved to hustle, I got to help build out the newsroom and recruit new talent. We went from two people to over 20 in a short couple of years. I had my own weekly column, called “A Grain of Saul,” and we were standing up news shows on Facebook that would garner hundreds of thousands of views. I felt like we were building one of the most successful media brands in the world. Like we couldn’t be stopped.
And then, almost overnight, the floor came out.
