When did staying informed become a full-time job filled with frustration and outrage?
We live in time with access to more information than at any point in history, yet separating news from commentary, facts from opinion, and signal from noise has arguably never been harder.
On this episode of Worthy for Thirty, I sat down with Kira Shishkin, founder and CEO of informed.now, https://informed.now a minimalist news platform created upon a radically simple idea: provide people with most salient facts they need to know, then let them make up their own minds.
Kira’s relationship with information is deeply personal. As a teenager, he survived a devastating car accident that resulted in years of memory challenges. That experience forced him to think differently about attention, learning and what information is actually worth remembering.
Years later, after living across Ukraine, Israel and the United States, Kira began questioning another problem: we don't have an information shortage; we have information overload or obesity.
That realization turned into informed.now. https://informed.now
Instead of an endless feed, informed.now delivers a concise daily news briefing via text. No ads. No clickbait. No outrage loops. And whenever possible, it points readers back to primary sources so they can see where the information originated.
Kira and I dug into the business model behind that philosophy, and why it matters.
We explore how the internet's shift toward ad-supported news changed the incentives of media companies; why Kira believes making the advertiser the customer fundamentally changed the relationship between news organizations and their readers; and what happens when a company intentionally chooses to make the reader, not their attention, the customer.
We also discuss:
• Why attention may be one of our most valuable resources
• The difference between news and news commentary
• How clickbait and rage bait became features of the attention economy
• Why media literacy increasingly means finding and reading primary sources
• How informed.now determines which stories are significant enough to make its daily briefing
• Why Kira is intentionally building a product designed to take up less of your time
• The decline of local journalism and the challenge of staying informed about our own communities
• Why informed.now refuses advertising and instead aligns its business model directly with its readers
• The opportunity to bring news minimalism into businesses and teams
What struck me most about this conversation is that Kira isn't trying to build another product competing for our attention.
He's trying to build one that gives our attention back.
And that feels especially relevant to the premise behind Worthy for Thirty: can you build a sustainable business where the mission isn't bolted onto the company, but embedded directly into the company's operation?
For informed.now, protecting the reader's attention isn't separate from the business model.
It is the business model.
If you've ever opened your phone intending to check one headline and emerged 30 minutes later feeling more anxious, but not necessarily more informed, this conversation is worth(y) (of) your attention.
🎙️ Worthy for Thirty is hosted by Eric Tash and features conversations with founders, executives and changemakers building businesses that prove doing good and doing well don't have to be mutually exclusive.
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