Question 1

Hi, In terms of social impact, what your company does is fantastic. A few questions came to mind: 1). Is the bias chart mostly based on viewer feedback? 2). The sample size can impact rating. How do you normalize ratings across different news outlets with different numbers of ...

Accepted Answer

Hi Helen, Thanks for your questions! Here are my answers: 1) The ratings on the chart are based on scores given by teams of analysts trained by us according to our content-rating methodology. They are not based on consumer opinion polls. You can find a brief overview of that process here: https://www.adfontesmedia.com/about-the-interactive-media-bias-chart/ A deeper dive into that methodology is in our White Paper, published about a year ago. Our methodology is still similar today. ...

Question 2

I have a couple of questions that I did not see answers to in the information online. 1. Is there a possibility of venture capital acquisition or some other form of equity growth direction and control in the future?  This seems to be a troubling possibility.    ...

Accepted Answer

Let me answer the second one first: Ad Fontes Media is registered as a “public benefit corporation” in the state of Colorado. This is the legal entity structure that is analogous to a B Corp in its functions—that which Colorado has passed legislation to authorize, as you mention. The designation “B Corp” is available through certification by a private entity (bcorporation.net). A company has to be a bit bigger than ours in order to get formally certified, but an underlying requirement is that...

Question 3

Hi Vanessa, Great product here; I can definitely see a future in this and kudos to you for taking the startup this far. Just a follow up to Helen’s 3rd question, is there a reason why you chose to not have a dedicated marketing/sales team? I imagine that by going through an ed...

Accepted Answer

Hi Geoffrey, Sorry I missed this question earlier! We do plan on having a dedicated marketing and sales team in the educational space--we believe that will accelerate our traction in that marketplace. Since we have been able to achieve sales with just inbound leads and very little marketing other than social media posts so far, we are first focusing on maximizing our revenue from those channels and improving our product before spending money hiring dedicated sales and marketing staff. We are ...

Question 4

Have you thought about defining these concepts through a linguistic model and then use NLP to capture text as data in order to estimate estimate the parameters of the model that relate to reliability and bias. This way you could essentially rate each article in real time.

Accepted Answer

Hi Ben, Yes, it is definitely part of our roadmap to at least partially automate our ratings so we can eventually do them in real time. We’re currently working on automation of parts of this, but NLP alone (or any kind of AI/ML at this point) isn’t going to give us the level of accuracy we need for the questions we are asking (how reliable/truthful, how biased), because these are highly context-dependent questions. It’s not as simple as sentiment analysis or subject matter grouping. We’ll get...

Question 5

Have there been any discussions or plans to develop an application, web tool, or browser extension with the ability to grade news sites as they are visited, as a way to more broadly inform users, increase short-term revenue, and grow customer base?

Accepted Answer

Hi Kasie, Yes, we are currently developing a browser extension for exactly those purposes. We hope to be able to release our beta version quite soon, which will plug into our database and show users where each visited website falls on our Media Bias Chart. Thanks, Vanessa

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