About this episode
Isaac Saul saw knee-jerk distrust in media firsthand as a political journalist at outlets like Huffington Post, where what he wrote would end up being distrusted based on the place it appeared rather than the substance. Three years ago, Isaac started Tangle with the idea that presenting both sides to news stories would appeal to a wide group of people. And that’s proven true. Today Tangle has 8,000 paying subscribers and nearly 50,000 free email subscribers – a 16% conversion rate is amazing. It is launching a new ad program to complement the $30,000 a month in recurring revenue it takes in. Like Semafor, Tangle has its own spin on deconstructing the atomic unit of news, aka the news article. Tangle separates out the factual presentation of the issue, before presenting the view from the left, the view from the left, and then Isaac’s viewpoint. This is hard to pull off, particularly with issues like affirmative action , Covid-era school closures , and, of course, all things Trump . “I am pretty politically incongruent. I try to go and understand, as a politics reporter, what's happening in the world. In order to get a balanced view of any single story, I would have to read 10 publications that have clear, diametrically opposed political leaning. I can't just read the New York Times. I have to read the New York Times news section and then go read the Wall Street Journal if I really want to get this full picture. And so I was like, there have to be other people like me out there. I figured if I could put all that stuff in one place, a lot of sort of politically open-minded people would read it.”