Straight Arrow News was founded around a simple observation: a growing number of Americans feel alienated from modern news coverage. Depending on where they get their information, people can walk away with completely different understandings of the same event — a dynamic that founders Joe Ricketts and Jonathan Harding saw firsthand despite coming from different political viewpoints themselves. Their answer was to launch a digital news outlet built around politically unbiased reporting, a stricter separation between news and opinion, and a less combative relationship with audiences. Over the past year, that mission has increasingly been shaped by chief content officer Derek Mead, the former Vice executive who joined the company to help evolve it beyond a high-volume aggregation model and into something more ambitious.
That transition reflects a broader shift happening across digital media. For years, publishers chased scale through SEO, social traffic, and programmatic advertising, often producing massive volumes of interchangeable content in the process. But as ad economics deteriorated and platform algorithms became more volatile, many media companies found themselves trapped in a cycle where audience attention mattered more than audience loyalty. Straight Arrow News is trying to build a different kind of news organization — one centered on habitual engagement, original reporting, video distribution, and eventually reader revenue.
In a recent interview, Mead explained why the company is investing more heavily in original journalism, how it’s using social video and mobile products 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.
Building a News Brand Around “Unbiased” Reporting
The core premise behind Straight Arrow News is straightforward but difficult to execute at scale. The company wants to provide politically unbiased news coverage in a media environment where audiences increasingly perceive nearly every major institution as ideologically aligned.
That doesn’t mean the organization believes traditional journalism is fundamentally broken. In fact, Mead was careful to emphasize that many legacy publications still produce exceptional reporting, regardless of their perceived ideological leanings.
“I think there’s not enough credit given to how good the media is,” he said. “If a publication that’s clearly on the right or the left is doing great reporting, there’s no problem with that.”
But Straight Arrow News believes there is still a meaningful gap in the market for audiences who feel exhausted by highly polarized news environments or disconnected from institutional media brands altogether. The company’s approach is less about pretending journalists can operate without any perspective whatsoever and more about creating reporting processes that consistently prioritize fairness, transparency, and clarity.
“We spend an enormous amount of time thinking through everything from how we phrase headlines to how we’re writing stories to what our sourcing is,” he said.
That editorial mission has become increasingly central to the company’s identity as it tries to distinguish itself in an overcrowded digital news market.
Paywall incoming…
The rest of this case study is behind a paywall, but if you aren’t ready to subscribe, you can also download it as an ebook over here.