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When the news media startup Caliber first launched in October 2022, I was initially skeptical.
Originally called The News Movement, the brand embraced a commercial and editorial strategy that knowingly ran counter to the prevailing wisdom of the time.
Rather than shepherding social audiences toward owned-and-operated websites, it was content to meet them where they were, deploying vertical video that met followers in their feeds.
It eschewed any form of subscription revenue, offered no newsletters, and barely produced any written material.
Three-and-a-half years later, the company has evolved, though only a bit.
The News Movement launched a holding company, called Caliber, to house its growing portfolio of media brands, which now includes The Recount, the lifestyle newsletter Capsule, and its creative studio Caliber Collective.
One of its cofounders, Will Lewis, also left the company to become the chief executive of The Washington Post, a departure that felt like inauspicious at the time but now appears to have been a blessing in disguise, given his uninspiring tenure at the publisher.
But other than that, the core mission of Caliber remains unchanged.
The media brand believes that traditional news organizations have for too long worked to bend consumers to their legacy modes of output, rather than create content that people actually want to consume.
That creed made Caliber an early and fervent adopter of vertical video, which has become ubiquitous in the years since its launch.
Now, nearly every major news outlet has a dedicated tab on its app devoted to scrollable video, a concept Caliber embraced from the outset.
It might have taken a while, in other words, but eventually the industry caught up to Caliber.
So when Ramin Beheshti, the cofounder and CEO of the company, invited me to their office in Flatiron to demo an early version of its new vertical video app, SaySo, I tried to be less skeptical this time around.
The product, which Beheshti teased last fall, presents users with a daily Digest, a collection of vertical videos designed to surface content tailored to the interests of users.
A separate Explore page allows users to find new creators on their own accord.
At launch, only 30 or so creators are participating in SaySo, a small number but one that reflects an important element of the product, which is that all of its content creators are vetted by Caliber.
These creators, whose followings range from 200,000 to 4 million, do not yet create content exclusively for SaySo; instead, when they are distributing their vertical videos, they can upload them to SaySo as another point of distribution.
While the number of categories covered will expand, at launch most of the content deals with politics, climate, lifestyle, and urban planning.
Critically, the Digest product presents users with a finite number of videos—for me, it was around 12 per day.
The point, per Beheshti, is not to keep users glued to their phones, but to inform them quickly and in an accessible fashion with news content from trustworthy sources.
(Notably, the endless scroll itself has lately come under legal scrutiny, following landmark legal cases against Meta and Google in recent weeks.) SaySo has no immediate monetization plans; while it focuses on fine-tuning its product and growing its audience, it will probably not generate any revenue this year.
When it does come time to flip the revenue switch, the primary product will likely resemble a freemium model, with users paying for additional features, like more Digests or enhanced access to creators.
Rather than traditional display or native advertising, certain product features might be underwritten by sponsors, similar to the Apartment Therapy model.
The concept behind the product is compelling enough, but adoption will likely still be challenging.
Most people only use around six apps on a daily basis, Beheshti admitted, so spurring user uptick will present its own set of hurdles.
Caliber has a small advantage in that it can use its other brands, including TNM, The Recount, and Capsule, to promote SaySo, but its ability to amass users will largely depend on the degree to which its creators promote it.
The creator base, which the company aims to grow to 100 by the end of the year, will be incentivized to promote SaySo because it offers them a share of the revenue generated, according to Beheshti.
While platforms like TikTok and Instagram are great for exposure, they typically offer meager payouts to all but their most popular creators, an oversight that SaySo hopes to use to its advantage.
Regardless of its success, the launch of SaySo shows Caliber is doubling down on its core thesis, which holds that companies need to serve content in the ways their audiences prefer to consume it.
If leaning into vertical video was the first iteration of that, then this deeper embrace of creators is the natural step in that evolution.
Of course, Caliber is not completely alone in its effort to work more closely with creators.
Across the media ecosystem, news brands have been reassessing their relationships to renegade newsgatherers.
Some, like the Vox Media Podcast Network, have built creator networks that complement their core businesses.
Others, like Morning Brew, have experimented with turning their corporate staff into talent, while outlets like Wired, Bloomberg, and The New York Times have worked to treat their reporters more like talent, hiring on-camera coaches and launching franchises attached to top attractions.
But few have so openly welcomed external creators into their company as Caliber will with SaySo.
The product represents the latest new boundary to have been crossed, with news media now openly directing their audiences to consume content from independent creators.
It is a platform play, obviously, so there is an editorial distinction between The Recount, for instance, and SaySo, but consumers are unlikely to be so discerning.
In 2025, I argued that the overarching media trend of the year was the creator-ification of media companies, that in the future the media ecosystem would become indistinguishable from a constellation of creator collectives.
We are still several years away from that point, but products like SaySo affirm to me that it is our end destination.
Consumer trust and affinity for individuals is orders of magnitude higher than it is for institutions, but operating as an individual creator requires that the entrepreneur hold a variety of roles at the same time: producer of content, along with salesman, marketer, insurance haggler, landlord, etc.
Few creators want to take on all of those mundane responsibilities, which is why media companies will persist, if only as infrastructure for the creators themselves.
With SaySo, Caliber is betting that the creator model of media will eventually supplant the nameless, faceless monolith that has defined media for decades.
Even the Economist is putting its reporters on camera, if you needed any more proof.
The question is not whether or not Caliber is right about this prediction, but whether or not it is right about the timeframe.
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