This media startup is trying to reach readers exhausted by political noise

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Straight Arrow News was founded around a simple idea: a lot of Americans feel like they’re living in completely different realities depending on where they get their news.

The company grew out of conversations between founder Joe Ricketts and media executive Jonathan Harding, who come from different political viewpoints but realized they were often consuming very different versions of the same stories.

Their goal was to build a digital news outlet focused on politically unbiased reporting and a clearer separation between news and opinion.

Over the past year, that mission has increasingly been shaped by chief content officer Derek Mead, the former Vice editor who helped oversee that company’s international expansion and also ran its US newsroom.

In a recent interview, Mead explained why the company is moving away from high-volume aggregation and investing more heavily in original journalism, how it’s using video and social distribution to reach audiences fatigued by partisan news, and why he believes there’s still room for a new national media brand built around trust instead of outrage.