Also available on: Apple Podcasts · Spotify
Ramin Beheshti, CEO and Co-Founder of Caliber, shares his journey from leading technology at Dow Jones to building a media company focused on reaching younger audiences. We discuss credibility, the growing influence of content creators, brand partnerships, and how Caliber is rethinking the way people consume news.
Key Takeaways
Credibility takes time to build and can disappear quickly. Following through on commitments and being transparent are essential to earning trust.
Creators are becoming media companies. Audiences often build personal connections with creators that traditional institutions struggle to replicate.
Make content easy for your audience to consume. Even valuable information can be overlooked if the experience creates too much friction.
A large audience doesn't automatically create a profitable business. Caliber expanded into brand services and creator partnerships after learning the challenges of monetizing social media reach.
Stay curious, even when you're experienced. Asking questions, acknowledging what you don't know, and accepting that everyone is figuring things out can help you grow.
Follow Ramin Beheshti:
Website (Caliber)
Website (The News Movement)
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Transcript:
00:00 Credibility and Trust
Mike Zimmerlich: Hey Ramin, how's it going?
Ramin Beheshti: I'm good, Michael. How are you?
Mike Zimmerlich: I'm doing fantastic, thanks for asking. I really do appreciate you being on the show. It's always exciting to have somebody who does some similar things as I do on, and it's always a blast because we always get to talk about really interesting topics.
And I'm really excited about your background as well as where you led up to today. I would like to start, because one of the things I noticed throughout your entire career is this similar topic around credibility, and I want to know, what does credibility mean to you?
Ramin Beheshti: That's quite a big question. I love it.
Look, I think I've been chasing it in some respects throughout the whole of my career, working for credible organizations, then working in news where the concept of credibility and trust are kind of intertwined.
I think one of the biggest challenges is credibility takes a long time to be earned, especially in the industry that we work in, and it's quite easy to be frittered away, or very quick to be kind of frittered away.
So it's something I spend quite a lot of time thinking about. But I think it also comes from the internal culture of how I lead and how I work and how I want people to describe me, if that makes sense, as being credible.
If I say I'm gonna do something, I do it. If the company says they're gonna do something, they do it.
People may not always interpret it like that, but that is definitely how we set our stall out.
Mike Zimmerlich: I love that. And it's interesting too, because you come from a tech background. You got your bachelor's in computer science, and I think that goes hand in hand, interesting enough, where, as you mentioned, if you say you're gonna do something, you're going to do it.
And I feel like when it comes to even when you're doing programming, right, it's like there's an end goal, right? There has to be something that ultimately you're going to be accomplishing.
So if you're making a promise that something's gonna be accomplished, usually one way or another you're gonna figure out a way to make that happen.
Ramin Beheshti: Yeah, it's true. I think my industry, and maybe this is why I got to the levels that I got to, my industry, the technology industry, is very good at committing to dates and then finding reasons why it's not going to be delivered on that date.
I think we're only second to the construction industry in terms of setting dates and not hitting them.
But it was something actually, I like the linkage because it's something I took a lot of pride in, being very clear as to why something can't be delivered or what the trade-offs are so that actually people can make a more informed decision.
But yes, the programming should have an endpoint. It should have an end date in terms of when something is done. But that is a bit vague, I'd say, in the technology industry.
Mike Zimmerlich: So were you always interested in the news? I'm kinda curious that when you started, you looked like you were on the path of tech, and then as we get to later on, you went a lot more into the news and media side.
But were you always passionate about it back then?
Ramin Beheshti: I'm an awful writer, so I was never, it wasn't like I ran the school paper and wanted to become a journalist and got seduced by technology.
I was always into computers. From a kid, I got my first Commodore C64 when I was six or seven and was trying to program.
So computers were always my passion, and it was the thing that I thought I was very good at.
But having said that, I grew up in a household where my dad had the newspaper, bought it religiously every day. Once he'd finished reading it, I would read it.
So I grew up with a passion in that respect for news and consuming news.
But I never actually thought I'd end up in the news industry. And the early part of my career, I worked in every other industry almost apart from media and news, so go figure.
Mike Zimmerlich: Yeah, because it looks like right after college, or not too long after that, you started working at Ernst & Young and Deloitte, which are big companies, but you were more in an analyst type of role.
Ramin Beheshti: Yeah. I mean, I went into consulting, which is kind of a path you go where you don't really know what to do.
I knew enough that I didn't wanna do any more exams. I didn't wanna be an accountant, so I went into their consulting part, in their technology practice, and I loved it. I worked there for seven years.
Like I said, I worked in the government, I worked in telecommunications, I worked in investment banking, retail banking. You name an industry, I've worked in it with a client. But I'd actually never worked in media or news until I left Deloitte.
But it was actually a great experience of learning about different industries, different ways of working, different relationship building, both with the team and with the client in a really short space of time.
Gave me a great grounding as well.
Mike Zimmerlich: I'm sure that also helps too once you get started getting into media, to understand how these different industries work, right?
Because you understand their language or sometimes what they're dealing with internally, right? When you're trying to report, I think a lot of it is that understanding of, well, this is how it works and why.
And that could help, whether it's not necessarily defending, but also trying to explain to the public, like, "This is the reason why this is happening."
Or also to call them out on it if there's something that is being done improperly or incorrectly.
So I think that is also useful too, when you have a wide range of experience in these different industries.
Ramin Beheshti: Yeah, I think so. I mean, just to play on the tech part, the other part of it was also being able to communicate complex subjects in a way that a broad audience could understand it.
That's what I found out my skill set was, which, if you think about it, translated into the news world. That is what the news industry is constantly trying to do, is take a fairly complex, in-depth subject and distill it in a way that audiences can understand it and make decisions based on it.
So the way I am fits, I think, with the way that the industry should be.
If I was slightly punchy about the industry, I'd say that it has become slightly more self-indulgent in terms of not realizing that the distilling of information is its role, and helping people understand what's going on.
And then I actually think in its communication of the value of what it does, I think there's a big gap.
We'll come on to talk about the rise of creators, and I think part of it is people don't necessarily understand.
I remember when I first started at News International, as it was, News UK, I spent an evening on one of the newspapers, on the floor of the newspaper for the whole night until they got the paper ready.
This was in the days where print was still the big thing, and I was blown away at the processes that went into creating that content and the decisions and the trade-offs and the, "We can't print that. We can't say that."
And it's all hidden, and audiences don't necessarily understand the rigor that goes into that content creation.
I think that's quite an interesting thread.
Mike Zimmerlich: So we're definitely gonna talk about this a little bit more later, but I do wanna bring up a point.
And I appreciate the fact that you also mentioned how it is today, right?
One of the things that you believe in, and I believe in the same thing too, is content creators being media companies.
But what I find also interesting, going back to what we're discussing in regards to credibility, is that with news organizations, there's a team that's developing the story and fact-checking and what can we say, what can we not say, and so forth.
And content creators, for the most part, don't have that structure or discipline, right?
09:00 Creators and Traditional Journalism
Mike Zimmerlich: So I find it interesting where that balance now is, that if content creators are considered media companies and a source of information, but are not necessarily required to be at the same standards as a news organization is.
Ramin Beheshti: Yeah, I mean, you hit on a fascinating and very true point.
I think almost the counter to that is audiences don't care. All of this rigor that is applied to the content, I'm making broad brush statements. Obviously, some audiences do really care.
But the lack of trust, conversely, that sits on the other side with that brand that is going...
I worked at some amazing journalistic institutions, The Times and The Journal, and to watch those people in action and, like I said, the thought that goes into it and the process that goes into it.
But somewhere along the way, that communication to the end audience is kind of lost.
And we talk about credibility, that the content creators, in some cases with some audiences, have more credibility because they're honest about what they do know. They're honest about what they don't know.
They're human, right? So you can feel them, not physically, but you can kind of connect with them on a personal basis.
And that's the new kind of credibility currency, if you like.
Mike Zimmerlich: I agree. And it's interesting, there are a number of content creators where I respect the work that they do because you can tell, I mean, at least the way they perceive themselves, I'll put it that way.
The way they perceive themselves is they feel authentic in the content they release, and you can tell that they are passionate about what they're trying to accomplish.
And again, there's a lot that still goes behind the scenes as far as, okay, is the information they're delivering accurate information? How are they getting that information?
But like you said, it's the delivery of it and that trust that they're building with their audience, that they're showing that they care about the material that they are releasing.
And I think that's the most important part, right? Is that aspect of showcasing your passion about the truth and whatever that truth is for yourself as a content creator.
Ramin Beheshti: Yeah, I completely agree.
I'd say the somewhat irony is that a lot of the content creators rely on mainstream journalism to get their information, right?
So breaking the story still happens in those newsrooms typically, especially holding power to account happens in those newsrooms.
And so the information flow comes still from traditional news, if you like.
And so content creators are at that level of credibility actually when they're standing up a set of information for their audiences.
And I think that is an interesting piece that isn't often talked about, is that if journalism went away tomorrow and news, a lot of the facts and information that creators rely on then also goes with it.
So we kind of have to find a way, and I guess this is why we built Caliber, I'm sure we'll come onto it, but it's to enable both parts to thrive.
Mike Zimmerlich: So were you learning all this when you were at News International? What was your role at News International?
Ramin Beheshti: Yeah. I mean, I was still in tech.
I should say I found out straight after university when I started at Deloitte that I wasn't very good at programming either.
There's a lot of things I'm not very good at, but I'm self-aware enough to realize that quickly.
So I realized quite quickly that I was much better in the role of understanding where the business was going and being able to translate that to the programmers or engineers.
So I did that across News UK. It used to be called business analysis, was the title, and then I found out that a new funky word for it was product.
So I became the head of product, which was setting the direction for all of The Times and Sunday Times in the UK's digital products.
Mike Zimmerlich: Which is incredible, by the way.
So you're developing that role, and we need that intermediary person, right? That will translate between business goals and programming.
I'm the same way. I got my bachelor's in computer information systems, so it was...
Ramin Beheshti: Oh, nice.
Mike Zimmerlich: Tech kind of thing, and found out also pretty quickly that I am not a good programmer at all.
I can translate what I want to accomplish and to develop and to do project management and to communicate. Really good at that part of it.
But the programming part, you give me, like, "Okay, I need to build this," I'll just stare at the screen for like 10 hours going, "I don't even know where to start," right?
Ramin Beheshti: Yeah. To me it was like learning a foreign language. I always really struggled with the syntax and stuff.
And it was the same when I was trying to be a programmer.
I guess I learned enough to be able to connect with engineers and with programmers in the same way as journalists. I have a tremendous amount of respect for their craft.
But we're kindred spirits, you and I, kind of come out of computer science, realized we weren't very good, and now work in the creator space. So who knew?
Mike Zimmerlich: Yeah, I like to say it a couple things.
One way I like to say it is the jack of all trades, master of none, or jack of all... I like to say jack of all trades, master of some.
Like, there's some...
Ramin Beheshti: Yes.
Mike Zimmerlich: ...good at, but we also like to dabble into lots of things, right?
15:00 Leading Technology at Dow Jones
Mike Zimmerlich: And the other way I like to put it too is, I like to know enough to just be dangerous, right?
It's like I know enough programming where I can get where things are going and may be able to tweak things as I go, but I don't necessarily have the full deep understanding as a full-time programmer.
Ramin Beheshti: Programmer. Agreed. Yeah, same.
Mike Zimmerlich: So you worked at News International, and then you went on to Dow Jones.
So can you talk a little bit more about that and then what your roles were over there?
Ramin Beheshti: Yeah. So I moved to New York.
I was obviously, you can tell by my accent, born and raised in London.
When I left News International, I joined Dow Jones. It's all part of the News Corp umbrella actually.
But I moved to New York, which was a life shift in 2014, and have been there ever since.
I'm still in New York now, a little bit outside it, but kind of worked my way up in Dow Jones.
I actually moved out of product and moved into what I talk about as hardcore IT, so servers, networks, the infrastructure layer, the internal applications.
And I remember my boss, as I was leaving the UK at the time, was like, "Why would you leave digital and go back into IT?"
And my ambition at the time was to run a technology department.
I was like, I need to, in order to be credible, I need to understand.
I've done the programming, not very well. I've done the translation part in product. I now need to understand the IT part in order to be a kind of fully fledged CTO.
So I went and did that.
I was the CIO, which is basically all the backend IT systems. I helped the company move to the cloud, to AWS, and then there was the opportunity to bring product and tech and IT all under one roof.
And so that was my job for many years at Dow Jones.
I was the Chief Product and Tech Officer, which meant that everything from the design of The Wall Street Journal website through to the coding, through to all of the systems that supported it, all of the editorial systems, and then all the servers and everything they sat on, all sat under my remit.
And this is not a brag, it's more a kind of holy moly moment, which was that I took that responsibility on at 34.
So I had a team of about 1,000 people reporting into me across all different parts of the globe.
And I'd actually achieved the ambition of running a technology department when I was 34, and I was like, "Oh, right. Interesting."
Mike Zimmerlich: That's incredible, especially at 34.
That's a massive, massive responsibility to have at that age, and just goes to show the quality of the work that you've been doing all up until this point, right?
That they have that much trust in you, and also you moved along within the company and you shifted around quite a bit.
And that just goes to show you about your work ethic.
And it sounds like to me, I mean, you're 34 years old and you have this amazing responsibility to have and you're actually making profound changes.
And at the time, it sounds like you were successful in your career at this point in time.
Ramin Beheshti: Yeah. I mean, it was a lot of responsibility.
I had jet black hair, both in my beard and on top of my head. I had a lot more hair actually probably as well.
I learned a lot about leading teams, a lot about getting things done.
You know, news organizations are small in some ways comparatively, but they are huge in terms of like an oil tanker trying to change.
And the Journal was an amazing institution where I kind of, the way I talk about it is I was honored to be like a custodian of its products for a period of time.
It delivered factual information that a lot of people use in their day-to-day lives to make business decisions on.
And we had our fair share of challenges and problems.
There was a lot of what we used to call legacy tech.
In 2015, we still had servers that were running from 2003 that were running some of the main systems.
And so there was a whole energy and effort to overhaul and replace a lot of old technology that was kind of hampering us from being able to take advantage of actually AI as was coming out around that time.
And it's that ability to communicate, yeah, all this kind of cool shiny stuff actually needs the solid foundations, because if you plonk it on the top, you're gonna start sinking quite quickly.
But at the same time, you can't stand still against your competition.
So it's kind of how do you balance those two parts?
So it was an amazing opportunity. I learned a lot on the job.
I think the English accent helps in America. And if I'm honest, I don't think I would've had the same opportunity in the UK.
I think I come across as a lot smarter, so that helped me get away maybe with a few more mistakes in the early part of it.
But by the end, I'm really proud of what we were able to achieve.
But we saw the industry changing, right?
So we'd got rid of a lot of the legacy technology. We'd rebuilt a lot of the products, but the way people wanted to consume products was changing, especially this kind of younger audience that the Journal wouldn't naturally necessarily attract.
Mike Zimmerlich: I can tell that you're really still jazzed about this even today, of the work that you've done.
And I'm curious though, because now we're getting into what you're doing currently, is that you decided that you wanted to start your own venture.
And I mean, you did some consulting earlier, so I'll say you were kinda dabbling in working for yourself.
But this is a major shift from this role that you had, now creating something which I believe first was called The News Movement.
So what made you decide that you wanted to go off on your own?
22:00 Starting The News Movement
Ramin Beheshti: I think, look, I love the institutions, genuinely love the institutions I worked for.
I still read The Wall Street Journal and The Times. They're both my go-to news products.
I think I'm a late millennial, so I'm right on the cusp of it. So my news habits are much more traditional.
But why did I go on my own?
One, I was afforded the opportunity.
Quite frankly, there was a group of us who were leaving Dow Jones at that point. It was just after COVID, and we'd seen at Dow Jones that younger audiences, there was a societal gap of younger audiences weren't getting their news the same way that I grew up getting my news.
I just switched from a newspaper to an online format.
But more and more younger audiences didn't have the same trust in the institutions that I'd...
It was like, "Oh, The Times, my dad read The Times, I'm gonna read The Times."
And so we decided to see if we could tackle it, and that was where The News Movement was born.
It was taking the principles of quality journalism, how do you research and report on a story, but delivering it in a format that enabled us to reach those younger audiences that were kind of underserved and in the space of social media, which is where they were getting their information from.
So that was the genesis behind creating it.
I was fortunate enough that I wasn't quite doing it on my own.
We started the business with five co-founders, which was a blessing and a curse. You've got five different opinions, colleagues that I'd worked with at Dow Jones and previously.
And so I didn't have to start it completely on my own.
But it was an amazingly humbling experience.
You go from kind of being the most wanted person, like you send an email, you get an immediate response, to people just ghosting you continuously.
Having to do all the setup.
I was writing HR contracts at one point because, like, how do you hire someone because no one's actually written the contract?
So let's go figure that stuff out. Setting up bank accounts, just stuff that I never thought I would need to do.
And it was a fun... Was it a fun experience?
It was an interesting experience. I learned a lot from it.
So yeah.
Mike Zimmerlich: That's incredible.
So was it while you were working at Dow Jones that you were feeling that desire, realizing that, okay, there needs to be a different delivery of news to younger generations?
Because I agree with you.
I'm also a millennial as well, so I remember growing up where my folks would, you know, the newspaper would be delivered to the door, right?
And that was, again going back to credibility, that was a credible piece because that was the newspaper, right?
And even when we got to where most of the news was on the internet, you still had the established publications that you would go and get your news from.
And you're right. Nowadays, it's far more segmented as far as where you get your news from.
Ramin Beheshti: Yeah. Did we see that? We saw versions of it, right?
We saw that it was harder to attract younger audiences.
We did a deal with Apple News at the time when I was at the Journal that we thought would help, but fundamentally they weren't in those spaces either.
And so it really was that moment of like, actually we can do something a bit different here.
We can create a news business.
The thing that was actually really attracting to me was, when you work in a large organization and especially when you've got a large team, it's less about your ideas and more about shepherding the good ones and trying to convince and persuade and influence and get people to agree that your direction or the direction of the team is the right one.
And I was really interested about, well, actually, can I do that on my own?
And actually, is my skill at persuading people or is my skill at executing and having an idea and being able to get on and deliver it?
I'd say the report card on that is slightly mixed, as we'll no doubt unpack.
Mike Zimmerlich: So, okay, you're going off on your own and you're developing this company with a number of founders and so forth.
And one of the things that I wanna talk about is misinformation, and we were talking about that a little bit earlier too, right? About content creators and their credibility.
But one of the things I noticed is that your mission is to fight misinformation.
Can you talk a little bit more about that and what that means?
Ramin Beheshti: Yeah. I mean, I think the mission has definitely evolved a little bit since that.
But you've done your research.
When we started The News Movement, The News Movement's mission was to tackle misinformation, and we debated a lot about, well, how do you tackle it?
Do you call out the fake news or do you...
We talked about at the time flooding the zone with correct content.
I think that's still part of what we're trying to do as a company, but now it's more about how do we create environments where people can get access to quality information rather than we're going to flood only the zone of social.
Because social's actually, even from five years ago, deteriorated in its ability to police itself and the quality that sits on there.
But that was part of the motivation, right?
That was part of the insight, was that people were going onto social and there was no real distinction between a high-caliber, pardon the pun, high-quality content creator and a bad actor or a well-meaning amateur.
And so that was quite an interesting, that was where the genesis of it came from.
Why couldn't we sit in the middle of that, create content that audiences will want to consume, but have it well-researched and well-reported at the same time?
Mike Zimmerlich: So can you talk to me a little bit more about how you go about doing that?
Do you have your own hosted channels? Do you have a network of different individuals and people that work?
I'm curious where now, especially with The News Movement and Caliber, essentially now we can get into that more.
But I'm curious, how are you delivering that specifically? Can you talk more about that?
29:00 Reaching Younger Audiences
Ramin Beheshti: Well, so I think if you go back to when we were just The News Movement, it was one brand.
We had our own Instagram, TikTok, which was big for us in the early days, YouTube channel.
I think one of the fascinating things for me was we'd go and speak to people and be like, "We're launching this. It's gonna be on social."
And they were like, "You can't tell the news in video form on TikTok."
And I remember Russia had just invaded Ukraine at the time, and people were like, "You can't do justice to the story."
Now, you wouldn't think twice. You're like, "Well, yeah, that's how many people are getting their news."
But that was one of the biggest challenges actually when we started out.
They were like, "You can't do it justice in 60 seconds."
And I was like, "People are already getting their news in 60 seconds about this stuff on video, on TikTok."
You can either choose to ignore it, which many did, or you can get in there and do something about it.
And so what we did from the outset was we built a credible newsroom and a credible editorial team, which still exists today for The News Movement.
I'll say a big learning was when we set out, we didn't think about how we would work with creators in the same way.
I think a year in or two years in, we were like, hang on a second.
We can keep trying to do this ourselves, but now how do we work with other credible voices on social who are content creators, who are thinking about how to build their profile and their media business?
And so I think it's definitely evolved since then, and Caliber is now much bigger than just The News Movement.
I'd also like to say I've been a bit self-deprecating, but I'll be a bit positive, is that we proved a lot of people wrong, right?
There was this feeling that Gen Z wasn't interested in the news, and you couldn't do the news, and that no one's really gonna care unless it was loud and opinionated and shouting at people or shouting about people, that no one engages with stuff on social.
This was all stuff, like I said, it's very humbling.
People who did return my emails were like, "You can't do it. It's not gonna work."
And we sit here less than five years later, and TNM reaches 100 million people a month.
And two-thirds of under-35-year-olds in the UK and about a third of under-35-year-olds in the US consume TNM content on a monthly basis.
They will consume news. You just have to deliver it and create it in a way.
And I think, again, that argument has now failed, but it's kind of a proud proof point for me.
Mike Zimmerlich: I agree.
And if you think about it too, right, and just doing a quick little tangent, I was thinking more about news consumption in general, right? And then where consumption's actually happening.
And if you think about it, for the most part, traditional news is either physical form, which actually ironically now more, especially Gen Z and younger generations are getting more back into now.
Which I find is really fascinating and makes a lot of sense because there's just so much noise now.
Ramin Beheshti: Noise.
Mike Zimmerlich: Right?
That it's a way to help them focus.
But then outside of that though, you have your traditional news channels, but that's assuming that you are watching traditional TV, which most don't, right?
So you're going to streaming, which now everything is more on demand, which news, kind of sort of, right? But not as much.
So you're thinking now more along the lines of YouTube or your standard streaming channels, right?
Or you are reading news articles. Sure, that could also happen too, but a lot of times, I'm also equally guilty of this, is headline hunters.
You just read the headlines and then unless it's really interesting, go to the next thing.
But the other challenge too is that a lot of times if you look at a headline and go, "Oh, this is interesting," what's the first thing that comes up?
One of two things.
It's either a paywall, which you're like, "Ah, I'm not that interested enough. I can probably get it elsewhere," right? So either skipping it.
Or two is that two-thirds of the page are ads. They're banner ads or pop-ups or all these different types of things.
And especially if you're scrolling on your mobile, and you'll appreciate this, if it's not optimized for the phone and all you're seeing is just a bunch of stuff, how interested am I going to be in that article if I have to sit clicking on a whole bunch of X's to actually get to the material?
And if I'm not that interested, I'm probably gonna just move on and go somewhere else, right?
So I think it's also the time of how people want their information.
And you're right, with social media, there's a reason why everyone's there.
They are extremely efficient as far as how they're delivering the content and information.
And whether you like it or not, most people are expecting that information to now be free, or not even just free, but have very, very little to no friction to it.
And once you're introducing friction into it, unless it's something that is totally engaging for them, they're just gonna move on to something else.
Ramin Beheshti: Yeah, it's 100% true.
You've described very well why people moved over to content creators because the industry itself got slightly...
I don't know. I built some of them paywalls, that at the point where you're the most curious, it's kind of like, "Well, sign up for a year."
And you're like, "I don't wanna sign. I just wanna read the rest of this article."
Or yeah, like you said, you're scrolling past all these banners.
Versus, and this was the premise behind the start of The News Movement, was how do you make it so seamless that it's just integrated into people's lives?
And actually, as we talk a little bit more about what we're building today, I kind of think there is an opportunity where people will pay for utility.
They won't pay necessarily for their curiosity to always be solved, right?
Because as you get curious about a story and then you're like, the paywall, people have got wise to it.
And they're like, "Well, okay, I didn't care that much," or, "I'll try and find it for free somewhere else," or, "Actually, the headline will do. I'll just kind of move on."
But people will pay for utility, like they're paying it with their chatbots.
It's like, how does something fit into your life that makes life easier, makes you better informed without you having to work particularly hard for it?
Mike Zimmerlich: Absolutely. Exactly.
And that's why I'm always curious about the subscription-based models and things like that too, right?
It's the same kind of concept.
I like the idea of the content creators because, again, it is, like you said, completely integrated.
But even like you mentioned about Apple News, things like that, where they're highly curated for myself.
Because that's the other thing too, is that a publication, if I'm only interested in maybe 10% of the articles they produce every single year, is it worth a subscription to that one publication when I'm only interested in a fraction of what they actually produce?
In comparison to something that's highly curated, where it's taking all the different articles from various different publications, but all in relation to something that I like, right?
That's more tuned for me, where now maybe half or 60%, or even greater, is actually something that I'd be interested in.
So again, I agree with you. It really does come down to the deliverability, but then also building a structure that can help support that.
And I'm very curious. I would love to learn more about Caliber now as far as where you're at now, what you're doing, and how do you collaborate with creators?
37:00 Building Caliber and Its Brands
Ramin Beheshti: Yeah.
So out of The News Movement, we grew. Like I said, we proved that young audiences will consume news.
We acquired The Recount, which was a great brand that was in a difficult situation around the end of 2023.
It was soon to be closed, and we rescued it, and it had a large audience, and it was focused on US politics.
And it was a really great brand with a really passionate team who I'm really pleased that we kept a lot of the good ones.
And so then we started to broaden out.
We also built out what was a fashion and lifestyle, now more of a pop culture newsletter that, again, came from a passion project.
One of the beauties of having your own company is the ability to encourage...
And we've got a very young team, right? Most of the average age of our newsrooms and teams are well under 30 years old.
But a lot of them are passionate about certain things, and how can we help them live that out?
And so Capsule is our pop culture brand.
And that was born out of, and it's still run by, one person who was just like, "I really wanna do this. I think this is a great idea."
So almost like an internal creator.
Like, I want to create this content. I'm writing a weekly Substack. She's now creating a social offering off the back of it.
And that really was exciting.
So we started to grow out of just being The News Movement.
And from day one, actually, what we realized...
And we've had many missteps. I could do a whole podcast on what I've learned and things I'd do differently.
But one of the things that we realized early on was it's hard to monetize this audience.
So I can grow scale, I can grow eyeballs. It's not the same as the web was. I can't monetize it in the same way.
We knew that going in, but it was kind of like, oh, actually this isn't gonna...
Brands aren't getting this in the same way that we'd hoped they were getting it.
But what we did early on was we built an agency, which is like, hey, if we're creating all of this social content, if we're creating all of this knowledge and data and IP, how do we help brands reach their audiences and create content for them?
And that's grown to be our biggest revenue driver.
It's called The Caliber Collective, and it does a lot of white-label content for brands, helping them connect with different audiences, not even young audiences. It doesn't have to be.
And I think that was a really positive thing.
So again, you can see now we've got three or four different businesses.
We're kind of like, hmm, The News Movement doesn't fit anymore. We're not just a Gen Z news organization. We're much more than that.
And so the rebrand to Caliber happened.
Around the same time a couple of the founders left, and I think there was a bit more freedom in terms of how we went about doing the news.
And that's really where we started to work with creators.
I think I said before, we didn't start off thinking, oh, we're gonna partner with, work with, scale with creators.
But about three or four years ago, we were kind of like, ah, interesting. Why wouldn't we work with these guys?
They've got audiences, they've got credibility. How can we work with them? How can we help them?
So that was on TNM, it was on The Recount.
We had our own internal creators. We've got a couple more who have got their own brands inside Caliber.
And then I think a year and a half ago, I sat down with someone, a friend, and they were like, "It's your company, like, now."
The other founders had left apart from one founder who's the CTO, Dion.
And the advice was, do what you wanna do. Build what you want to build.
And so Dion and I sat down and went, "What is it that we've always wanted to do?"
Dion and I worked together at The Wall Street Journal.
He's a much better... He's the one who can code. Out of the three of us, he's the one who can code.
But a great leader.
And we came up with this concept of how about news from people that you trust on your terms?
So you talked about Apple and why Apple News is a successful product, because it brings together multiple different points of view or multiple different things that you're interested in, in one place.
42:00 SaySo and Trusted Creators
Ramin Beheshti: Oh, that's really... That I might pay for because I get everything that I need in one place.
Apple works with publishers.
What we set out to do was go, actually, we've got these relationships with these content creators on Instagram and TikTok, and they're working with TNM or they're working with The Recount.
They struggle to make money from just doing the content.
They can't go on Substack because Substack needs them to write a newsletter.
These guys don't write, they're video. They do write, but they're not newsletter...
How can we create a product for them?
And so that was the genesis of SaySo, which launched about three or four months ago in the UK and the US.
And SaySo is news without the overwhelm.
There's not an endless scroll.
It's a video-based app with trusted creators.
So we've spent a lot of time and energy vetting creators. We moderate them.
We don't edit them, we moderate them, make sure that they're not doing misinformation.
And so what you have is this safe space where you can get content in the way that you want to get content.
You can get it on your terms, and you can get it from people that you already trust because they've got fairly large social profiles.
And so I guess that's the evolution of how we've worked with creators.
Started with tagging onto the newsroom, to then building a whole business around them.
Mike Zimmerlich: That's incredible, and I really appreciate that work because it adds that layer of accountability, if you will, to content creators.
Where even though they already have the established trust, it's now that extra layer that's making sure that what they're delivering, and again, like you said, it's not being edited or censored, but it's making sure that the information that they're delivering is being accurate.
Ramin Beheshti: Yeah.
Mike Zimmerlich: Which is great because, again, that adds to that trust on my end, knowing, okay, if I'm consuming content on this specific platform, that it's being vetted in addition to the content creators that are being involved in the project.
Ramin Beheshti: And I think that in a world of, when we set out to do SaySo, AI slop wasn't in people's vernacular.
But in a world now where I go on Instagram and I'm like, "Is this real or is this not real?"
And I can't trust what I'm seeing.
And I'm scrolling through three videos and I'm like, "Ah, I don't know. I don't know if what I've just seen actually happened."
Let alone if it's factually correct, whether it's literally, has this event actually happened or not?
I think in that world, SaySo becomes even more of a beacon of, it's the same type of content that you get from social, from the people who are creating content on social, but there's a bar, a high bar of you have to be asked to come onto the platform as a creator.
And then I think the other part that's really important is it's the first time in my career I've built a product without advertising.
And the reason you build a product without advertising to start is you focus on...
Actually, I don't care if people come to it for 10 seconds in the day.
What I care is they come every day, they get their digest, their package of information that's personalized to them, that covers a broad range of topics.
If you don't come back again or you don't scroll through 35 videos, I don't care.
I don't want you to feel overwhelmed.
I want you to have enough information that you can get on with the rest of your day and get it from people that you trust, not necessarily from us, right?
So I think building that platform has been...
I've really enjoyed it actually, and I think the team has, the whole company's got behind it.
And I think it also comes from the place of we're not quite there yet, but in '27 we will be returning money back to creators as well.
So we spoke to a lot of them and they're like, "I've got 100,000, 300,000, a million followers. I'm not making any money from this. I'm doing it on the side of my desk."
And they want, A, to make money from it, which is totally good and normal, and B, they want tools and advice and support on, well, how do you raise the bar of what you're doing?
And so that's also been a great thing that we've been able to work with a lot of them on.
And they're really open to it, right?
It's like, well, actually this is the difference between a fact and an opinion.
You might just, same video, but you just might wanna separate those two parts out so that people can tell the difference.
Or here's a tool that we've built for our own newsroom that you can have access to so that you can see what's happening on your social media stuff, and you can decide what stories you double down on, et cetera.
So data tools that we built for our own businesses.
So yeah, it's been a real positive so far, touch wood, positive journey.
Mike Zimmerlich: SaySo right now, you mentioned, is for the most part invite only, right?
So they have to have a certain size of an audience or, and obviously the type of content that they're producing to be a good fit for that platform, correct?
Ramin Beheshti: Yeah. Yeah.
We will kind of open up for people to apply, but there's always going to be a bar, right?
I don't wanna talk badly of the newsletter platforms. I think they're fantastic.
And actually we've built some products on Substack and Beehiiv, and I think they're great platforms, but they've gone the direction of no curation.
So anyone can set up a Substack.
So you can have two people covering the same topic. One is a well-meaning, well-researched person and the other person's not, and you can't tell the difference.
What we are trying to say is actually...
Mike Zimmerlich: Right, you're actually vetting the people that are on the platform, where these platforms are just...
Ramin Beheshti: Open.
Mike Zimmerlich: Tools, right? For anybody to have access to and so forth. And both are important for very...
Ramin Beheshti: 100%. 100%.
I completely agree, and I can see the other side of it to us.
We'll invite people that we want to invite and won't invite. Those ones are kind of more completely open.
But I think from a quality perspective, that was what we were trying to achieve.
48:00 Brand and Creator Partnerships
Ramin Beheshti: And it wasn't people who are politically aligned with either one of our brands.
That's a big push from me of how do we get different dissenting voices on that platform, as long as they are trying to do things in a respectful and well-researched way.
Mike Zimmerlich: Do you wanna talk about The Caliber Collective for a second?
Because you mentioned that's right now the agency, because obviously with my agency, Omelette Prevail, I definitely relate to that.
But I'm curious, you mentioned about white-labeling for brands, which I find is very interesting.
Do you go after sought-out content creators for producing white-label content?
Is it mostly in-house? Do content creators reach out to you saying, "Hey, I'm available for doing white-label content for brands"?
How does that process work?
Ramin Beheshti: So yeah, it's a really good question actually.
And I think that's where the content creator partnership started, in that space.
And it's evolved a lot.
I think a lot of it originally was we do it in-house and we might bring in the odd content creator.
More and more now brands are coming to us, and really interestingly, more recently, brands that are B2B rather than B2C.
I think the B2C world is further along the journey of working with content creators, especially on social.
I think more and more B2B brands are like, "Huh, this is a really..."
Like everybody on social is a professional as well.
Or all professionals pretty much have a social media presence.
So it's kinda like, how do I reach them in those spaces, not just at an event or not just at a trade show?
And how do I find the right creator to deliver my message?
And how do you produce that in a way that's still engaging? And how do I deliver that?
So what we've found is we do a lot of social media management, a lot of content production that is in-house, but more and more we're also partnering that with content creators.
And to just bring that to life, we're working with a men's health charity called Movember.
They're an amazing brand. They do the November mustache...
Mike Zimmerlich: Yes.
Ramin Beheshti: ...to raise money.
Yeah. But we created a whole YouTube series around young men's mental health, so specifically targeted at mental health.
And that is us producing it, but working with content creators that we know will resonate and connect with that audience.
And so that's how our offering has evolved, I'd say, over the past couple of years.
Mike Zimmerlich: Amazing.
Well, we can start wrapping things up here.
So there are a couple of fun questions that I have for you.
First question I have for you... Actually, I'm gonna change the order a little bit.
Ramin Beheshti: Oh.
Mike Zimmerlich: I'm gonna change it up a little bit because we were talking about content creators.
Do you have, I know sometimes it's like your favorite child, but do you have a content creator that you'd like to give a shout-out to? I'll put it that way.
Ramin Beheshti: I've got a great story.
So last week we had our summer party in New York, and unfortunately I had to be in London, so I missed it.
And I was already gutted because the summer party was a great event.
But it was in a park in New York and they played kickball. They had obstacle races.
And it just so happened that one of my favorite news content creators was sitting in the bleachers watching and ended up playing.
Dylan Page, who's got a huge profile on TikTok, and he's an awesome guy, and he ended up joining in with the team and playing kickball.
So not only was I originally gutted to miss out because the first day got rained off and then the next day I had to be...
But also Dylan Page actually was on one of the teams.
I think he was filming something in the park.
So Dylan is someone that I follow on TikTok.
I think he's changed the game actually from a news content creation perspective.
Mike Zimmerlich: I'll have to check him out.
Do you have a guilty pleasure? And that could mean anything from a favorite film, food, TV show, music artist. It could be anything.
Ramin Beheshti: So I have a terrible taste in music, and actually this is a mainly American podcast, so the band that I love is basically like a worse, more cheesy version of the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC.
So that's one guilty pleasure.
Mike Zimmerlich: What music?
Ramin Beheshti: They're called Westlife. They're a proper UK boy band.
So that's one of my guilty pleasures.
I'd say the other one is, actually one of my top five favorite films is The Devil Wears Prada. So there you go.
Mike Zimmerlich: I saw that movie.
Ramin Beheshti: We are kindred spirits.
53:00 Advice on Curiosity and Careers
Mike Zimmerlich: Yeah, I saw that movie, I kid you not, for the first time like four months ago because the sequel was coming out, and I realized, I said, "I've never seen this movie."
Ramin Beheshti: Oh, love it. Seen it so many times.
Mike Zimmerlich: And so I watched it. I went, "Yeah, now I can see why everyone really liked this film."
And it stands up well today, right?
Because sometimes there's those films where you had to be at the moment when it was in theaters to really appreciate it, but that actually still lives up to today.
Ramin Beheshti: Very nice.
Mike Zimmerlich: I saw the sequel as well, and the sequel was also...
Ramin Beheshti: It's good. I mean, the original's the best, but yeah.
Mike Zimmerlich: The original was better, but I would say the sequel was definitely very enjoyable.
I liked that as well, so that's a good one.
All right, last question for you.
If you were only able to give one piece of advice, what would that one piece of advice be?
Ramin Beheshti: I think the advice that I always tell myself is that everybody else is making it up as they go along as well.
I think it's something I've realized probably later in my career than I should.
I looked at everyone and was like, "Oh my God, they've got their shit together. They know where they're going. They know what they're doing."
And I don't know what was the epiphany moment, but I was like, "Oh, no, they don't actually."
And everyone's kind of insecure, self-doubt, questioning themselves, wondering why they're in the room.
And I think especially actually for content creators, because they kind of look at institutions and they're like, "Oh, wow."
And it's like everybody's making it up as they go along.
Mike Zimmerlich: Well, I have to vouch for that for myself too, is that that's 100% true.
Doing this podcast, the agency, and everything before that, a lot of it's been making it up as you go along.
And that's sometimes the way I prefer it, is I like to jump into something having some of an understanding so that I kinda have an idea of where to go.
But then just being a part of it and learning, and like you mentioned about making mistakes too, and that's the other thing too, is that knowing full well you're going to be making plenty of mistakes, and that's okay. That is part of the...
Ramin Beheshti: Yeah.
I think the other, if I may tag on to that advice, is being curious.
So one of the things I find, and I've got two young children, they are so curious.
They wanna know everything about everything, and at some point that gets kicked out of you.
And especially if you adopt this thing of, if you can quell the noise that's like, "I shouldn't be here. I shouldn't be doing this."
If you can quell that noise, you then start to ask questions.
"How does this work? Why do you do it like that? What's going on over here?"
And that curiosity that you have as a child is something that I keep going on to the team about.
It's like, be curious.
Of every situation, just instead of assuming, ask a few more questions.
So that's my other advice as well, if I may.
Mike Zimmerlich: You know, it's interesting that you brought that up, especially with children.
Now that I think about it, I feel like curiosity as you get older almost feels sometimes like a weakness to your ego, right?
Because a lot of times, the reason why you don't ask those questions is because we feel embarrassed that we don't already know the answers to those questions.
But the ironic part is that we can't know everything.
Even something that we feel like we should obviously know, there's just so much that's out there that it's impossible to know everything.
So I've been also trying to be better about that too, and I've learned that a long time ago, is it's okay to ask questions.
It's okay to ask questions in an industry that you've been in for decades because even then, it's impossible to know everything about your career and what your craft is like.
So I think it's important to ask, not only to ask questions, but if there's something that you don't know, just say, "I don't know."
Ramin Beheshti: I don't know.
Mike Zimmerlich: Right?
It's like, "Let me find out."
Ramin Beheshti: Yep.
Mike Zimmerlich: And it happens over and over again, and you just have to be more comfortable with that as well because I feel like that in turn makes you more of a professional, it makes you better at what you do, and it helps you grow as a person when you are asking those questions and also admitting to when you don't know something.
Ramin Beheshti: Couldn't agree more. Couldn't agree more.
Mike Zimmerlich: Well, Ramin, thank you again so much for being on the show, and please keep up the good work.
We do need people like you that are doing this kind of work and making sure that people are getting reliable news and in a way that people are watching content now.
So keep it up.
Ramin Beheshti: Thank you, Michael. It's been a pleasure to be on. I've really enjoyed it.