HuffPo Co-founder Takes on Cable News With New Startup

Ken Lerer, one of the co-founders of The Huffington Post and the current chairman of BuzzFeed, has pulled back the curtain on his latest venture: a video news site called NowThisNews.

The startup officially launched on Monday after months of operating in stealth mode under the code name Planet Daily. NowThisNews raised $5 million in a financing round back in April and the company has put that money to good use by staffing up with some big names in media. Eason Jordan, CNN’s former chief news executive, has been brought on as the company’s general manager. Katharine Zaleski, the former executive director of The Washington Post, will be the managing editor, and ABC News Digital’s former executive producer Ed O’Keefe will be NowThisNews’s editor-in-chief.

Lerer told Mashable that NowThisNews won’t start putting out videos until mid-October, but the startup has already begun the process of building up buzz by posting to Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. The company also announced a partnership to share video content with BuzzFeed.

Lerer’s goal for NowThisNews is nothing short of disrupting the cable news industry by creating video news content that is designed to be shared and experienced through mobile.

“The opportunity is as big as as CNN’s opportunity was 25 years ago when CNN was able to have an enormous impact on how news was delivered to the consumer and disrupted broadcast TV,” Lerer told Mashable in an interview. “I think now is the time when you can disrupt cable television news.”

We spoke with Lerer to get some more details about the news service and what his plans are going forward.

Some people are calling this news site your answer to The Daily Show, others are calling it a CNN killer. Where do you see this fitting into the current media landscape?

I’m thinking of it on its own, not in comparison to any other site or TV show that’s up. What it is is mobile, video, social, digital. We hope to take advantage of those four trends for the digital news consumer. The opportunity is as big as as CNN’s opportunity was 25 years ago when CNN was able to have an enormous impact on how news was delivered to the consumer and disrupted broadcast TV. I think now is the time when you can disrupt cable television news. Six years ago was the time when you could disrupt print, whether it be newspaper or magazines. That now has happened. I think where video is in the digital world is now the time when you can significantly disrupt non-digital video and broadcasting.

We’ve seen several startups try to crack social video sharing for mobile devices with mixed results. Why did you decide to go after this space now?

The timing couldn’t be better. I think that if you go to a publishing site online, you’ll find that anywhere from 30% to 60% to 70% of their content is now being consumed on mobile. You pick the calendar year: When does the web become more video than not? Is it two years? is it three years? Is it six years? It’s inevitable, and that’s why the time for video is now.

One obstacle for mobile video sharing is the limitations of cellphone data networks. Are you concerned about this?

No, it will get there. As mobile matures, as video matures, in due time it will work its way out. If the consumer wants it, it will happen, and the consumer clearly wants to consume the news on mobile. And so do advertisers.

Can you tell us a little bit about how the partnership with Buzzfeed will work? 

There will be a distribution and a content deal. They’ll come up with ideas and we’ll come up with ideas for them.

Will you mainly be producing professional news videos or will you also be publishing more amateur videos as well?

It’s the former, not the latter. We have a proper studio. We rented the old Yahoo studio between 5th and 6th Ave [in New York City].

I’ve read that you currently have a staff of 16 at NowThisNews. How many more people are you expecting to hire in the coming months?

I think we’ll hire another half a dozen people by the end of the year â€" on-air producers, editors â€" and then we’ll be done. We should have about 25 people working for us by the end of the year.

Image courtesy of Facebook, NowThisNews