What The Hell America!

OptOut News, a news aggregation app that shared journalism from “financially independent” and largely progressive news outlets like The Nation, The Intercept, and Grist, has shut down due to a lack of funding.

Co-founder Alex Kotch — formerly an investigative reporter at the Center for Media and Democracy — told OptOut newsletter subscribers on Tuesday evening that the OptOut Media Foundation (the app’s nonprofit parent company) was unable to raise enough money to maintain the app and the organization, which also published its own investigative journalism. The app shut down on January 1 and has been removed from the Apple App Store.

Here’s part of what Kotch told readers:

Aside from our main seed funder, we weren’t able to secure any other substantial grants. We didn’t have enough money to truly market the app and newsletters so we could grow the way we wanted. Fundraising stagnated. Our biggest annual budget wasn’t much more than $100,000. Still, we continued improving the app, sending out newsletters, and began publishing original investigative reporting. We did a heck of a lot of quality work on a shoestring budget.

Last year it became clear that we couldn’t afford to maintain the app without a significant amount of new funding. Despite our efforts, most foundations that funded journalism said no. Most weren’t willing to take a risk with a new tech product. They seemed to stick mostly to funding news production and education directly.

We had a fantastic tech product, but we failed to adequately fund it. Therefore, we decided to shut down the app as of Jan. 1 of this year. ProgCode has taken over stewardship of the tech, which is offline as they figure out its next incarnation. But that doesn’t mean we’re going anywhere. Instead, we are shifting our resources to where they are needed most in this vital moment for the country.

The OptOut Media Foundation is rebranding to the “Accountability Journalism Institute (AJI), focused on producing hard-hitting investigative reporting to combat misinformation and dark money influence,” Kotch wrote. He also announced that he would be stepping down as the organization’s executive director and his co-founder Walker Bragman would fill the position.

Kotch and Bragman founded the OptOut Media Foundation in 2020 with the mission to “educate the public about current events and help sustain a diverse media ecosystem by promoting and assisting independent news outlets.” The OptOut News app first launched in March 2022 and had 15,000 downloads. Kotch and Bragman did not respond to a request for comment.

Read the full announcement here.