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In the summer of 2013, David Moore was reading an article about the state of high school journalism. The programmer for General Electric found it appalling how a dire economic landscape was forcing high school journalism departments to enact significant cutbacks to their programs, with some schools even having to shutter their programs altogether.
The article stuck with Moore, who proceeded to conduct several months of research into the market to ascertain the viability of developing an application. The first question he sought to answer was, “is there enough high school news to fill a social network?”
His research concluded that the answer was a resounding “yes.”
"It turns out, there are more high school news articles published per year than all of mass media combined,” said Moore. “The problem is that they're all on 16,000 different websites that no one knows about or can find. So in theory, we're aggregating the aggregator."
A year-and-a-half later, ScripBe (pronounced “skrip-bē”), a social news platform designed for both readers and editorial teams to connect under the banner of journalism, is poised in a beta stage that will see a limited rollout for the Spring semester of the high school academic year.
Moore, joined now by his former colleagues Dan Harrell (Co-Founder and CTO) and Andy Becker (Co-Founder and VP Engineering) have developed a platform that will not only help high school newspapers across the country to more effectively manage their content, but to also garner advertising dollars by giving the schools an opportunity to create online ads for local businesses, generating income for the department, as well as patronizing local business.
"The whole concept of making journalism cool again always stuck with me, but considering that other medias have already gone through significant transitions — and I'm talking about audio, the whole business of selling audio, music, has completely changed,” said Harrell, a father of three who left his position with GE to take on a consulting job, which allowed him more time to start work on ScripBe.
“The same thing has happened with movies and television over the last couple of years, so the whole thing hit me pretty hard, and I started thinking: journalism is one of the areas that hasn't had the opportunity to reinvent itself. And considering the struggles the industry has had over the last few years, it dawned on me that journalism is ripe for a major revolution."
ScripBe allows users to follow the newspapers they want to hear from, much like Twitter, allowing anyone to follow any paper, regardless of their status as a student. Faculty advisers can sign their paper up, where it is then verified by ScripBe, and then assign different roles to students. “Reporters” can create and edit articles, but cannot publish them. “Editors” can create and delete articles, and manage the comments. But only the “managers” can alter the paper’s settings, resulting in a virtual newsroom.
Because the development of the application was done on their own time, the company hasn’t entered a fundraising stage, something that they were advised to do throughout the process.
"We really got the same advice, which was, 'if you want to get the most out of it, you want to fund it as long as you can, said Harrell. “If you really believe that there's a solid business plan, then get out and build it. By the time you need money, you'll have more leverage when you go to that negotiating table and are negotiating a percentage of your company if you're asking for money."
On the eve of ScripBe’s beta launch, it’s not hard for the team to look back on the platform’s journey, and see why they decided to come on board.
"The reason that I got into this is because I wanted to make journalism cool again,” said Harrell. “And I think that's the best way to summarize what we're doing."
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