Newtonial seeks to break down the "echo chamber" of online news, commentary and cultural silos, with a knowledge platform that rewards broad reading, critical enquiry and understanding, and cultivates critical reasoning and content literacy.
Combining elements of balanced news, slow news, solutions journalism, rewarded engagement and cross-spectrum discussion and exchange, Newtonial is the new knowledge platform destination.
Today, voices as diverse as the "creator of the internet" Tim Berners-Lee and media royalty Katie Couric perceive the disfunction of the current news landscape as a threat to social cohesion and democracy.
“Can we build real-time curation systems for what we think is appropriate? Can we build systems that lead people to being more constructive and more likely to understand what it’s like to be on the other side of a cultural divide...?”
Tim Berners-Lee, 2021 Open Letter
“In today’s media landscape, consumers face a constant barrage of content that reinforces their established viewpoints. Powered by algorithms and shared ideologies, people often get affirmation instead of information, where facts are manipulated if not completely ignored."
Katie Couric, Co-chair,
Commission on Information Disorder
Through the gamification of news reading and comprehension, and the cultivation of cross-cultural exchange and awareness, Newtonial seeks to develop in readers a mindset and skillset able to distinguish opinion from reporting, to identify linguist bias and to be aware of amplifying linguistic techniques that drive and sustain extremist positions.
"I think the best thing we can do is teach everybody to think for themselves, so they just don't take what they've been told in the press, or in other forms of media, the internet, Twitter, so on, they don't just take that and shake it ups nd believe it, but they question it, and ask whether in fact it might not be true, or what the motives are for the people who are putting these things out".
Edward Thorp
Mathematician, Inventor, investor, author, gambler
Newtonial expressly seeks to represent the broadest spectrum possible of quality news. We do not take a position on the political or social alignment of a publication, only that it presents quality, fact-based reporting and commentary. The platform is designed to actively promote exploration across the spectrum of news, rewarding readers for both breadth and depth of reading on particular subjects.
As such, the platform benefits from having a broad range of contributing news sources, and seeks to develop an economic model that rewards news outlets for their quality product with an alternative revenue stream developed from their media content. Contributing news services form part of a collective that will receive a share of company net profits, and will also have representation at board level of news service interests.
News sources that represent valuable perspectives or sector-specific coverage that struggle to sustain themselves through existing news media financial models, can request support from a philanthropic division that will be funded from a percentage of net profits.
Newtonial is an explicitly social impact initiative that will provide a news platform that expressly seeks to represent the broadest spectrum possible of quality news, and to support the long term financial sustainability of the news sector.
The impetus for Newtonial grew out of the founders' concerns about how society might confront the drift of news content away from factual reporting and towards opinion and commentary with a primary aim of convincing or aligning, rather than informing, readers.
While efforts to control the flood of "fake news" are laudable, our primary aim was to complement these with a service that would provide readers, particularly those less engaged with news services, with the tools to parse and identify the fake or biased from fact and balanced opinion.
Using everything from games to de-bunking podcasts to solutions journalism, Newtonial aims to not only present fact-based news sources, but also to develop the skills to understand how language is used to persuade and to present particular perspectives.
Newtonial's mission is to support over the coming years a new model for sustainable finance for quality news titles beyond the current models of subscription and/or advertising.
Using machine learning-developed natural language processing solutions, Newtonial aims to offer organisations and public bodies the tools with which not only to engage with their audience, but also to act as responsible corporate members of civil society: to become aware of any implicit bias of their own; to build larger inclusive forums of engagement rather than smaller, socially siloed communities.
Many existing NLP systems are focused on improved customer experience or customer response, with a a focus on maintaining positive relationships with customers to understand their needs and evolving preferences, to ensure seamless experiences, or are leveraging the NLP technology to identify customer experiences to enhance solutions and services.
Newtonial’s focus is on understanding what users understand from natural language text - what their own interpretative process is - including how this differs between different segments of readers (age, education, culture, ethnicity etc.). By moving the NLP “upstream” in the communication process, organisations can better manage narrative from the outset and reduce confusion and/or expensive interactions to clarify messages moving forward.
