NowThis News is a progressive social media-focused news organization founded in 2012.
History
NowThis News was founded by Huffington Post co-founder and former chairman Kenneth Lerer and former Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau. The company was started in September 2012. NowThis originally focused exclusively on social media platforms such as Facebook, having announced in 2015 that it would not have a homepage. By 2018, it had backed down from this position. On December 8, 2015, NowThis News raised $16.2m in Series D funding. By this time, the company has said that 68% of its audience were millennials between the ages of 18–34. It was announced that this funding would be used to launch more focused channels. On March 17, 2017, NowThis News took over the YouTube channel Seeker Daily as a campaign to launch the network on YouTube. As of April 1, 2017, the channel had stopped posting videos to the channel. On September 8, 2017, NowThis rebranded the channel as NowThis World, following the same format as Seeker Daily and bringing back some former hosts. On May 4, 2017, NowThis News relaunched the YouTube channel SourceFed Nerd as NowThis Nerd, having acquired and subsequently terminated it previously. On July 3, 2017, NowThis Nerd released a video confirming that they are reverting the channel back to SourceFedNerd and deleting the content they had made since the change. As such, SourceFed Nerd now lives as an archive of the original content and NowThis Nerd has become its own separate channel. Former Channel 4 News head of digital Jon Laurence joined as Deputy Editor in January 2018.
Controversies
In 2015, Politifact found that NowThis News was the propagator of a false conspiracy theory which claimed that CNN deleted a poll of Facebook users which found that most participants thought that Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton in the first Democratic Presidential Debate. NowThis News created a video titled; "It looks like CNN is trying to help Hillary look good, even if that means deleting polls", however Politifact found that CNN did not delete the poll in question and in fact displayed the results of the poll during its broadcast, and also left it up on its Facebook page. The claim was rated as "Pants on Fire" false by Politifact. During the 2016 presidential campaign, NowThis News repeatedly claimed that Donald Trump lied about Bill Clinton signing the North American Free Trade Agreement using videos posted on Facebook and YouTube. However, Politifact found that NowThis News's claims were false, and Bill Clinton did in fact sign the final version of the North AmericanFree Trade Agreement as Trump had stated.
