What The Hell America!

When the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 2021, Irish war correspondent Jane Ferguson was in Kabul and decided to stay to report on the aftermath, posting videos on Instagram. Ferguson, who has worked steadily as a freelancer covering conflicts in the Middle East for outlets like Al Jazeera, PBS, and The New Yorker, said that was the first time she felt like she had the upper hand. Major news outlets now needed her more than she needed them because they had pulled their own correspondents out of the country.

Ferguson learned firsthand how independent journalists struggle to make ends meet while producing difficult journalism. She also saw how journalists amassed huge audiences on social media for their work. After she left Kabul, she knew she wanted to help freelancers get their stories to audiences who want news from individual creators — and are willing to pay.

“My whole career, I had needed either a network or a newspaper to have a career and reach an audience. If that’s what it was like for me — an incredibly privileged, white, Western reporter — the gatekeeping was even worse for all the local reporters, producers, and fixers I worked with all over the world,” she said. “It occurred to me that, actually, technology is going to allow us to solve for a number of issues here. When we build the new iteration of distribution of news, we’ll build it better and way more equitable.”

Enter Noosphere: a subscription platform for journalists to share their own original reporting with a paying audience in a scrolling, social-media-like format. Noosphere launched last week in the United States with 15 independent journalists on the platform, including Ferguson and her co-founder Sebastian Walker. Noosphere is also helping find and pay for insurance and safety equipment for its journalists on the front lines of conflict zones. The initial cohort includes Palestinian journalist Shrouq Aila in Gaza, Los Angeles Times Middle East bureau chief Nabih Bulos in Beirut, American journalist Anna Conkling in Ukraine, and others.

So far, the app is only available in the Apple App Store. It has a single newsfeed where users will see a chronological timeline of stories by the journalists posting on the app. Users can see “the bullpen” of all the journalists signed up to post on Noosphere and follow them individually. Journalists’ profiles have an “articles” section for their full stories and a “briefs” section to share behind-the-scenes from reporting. They can also tag their stories with topics, so users can click on those tags and see related stories from all over Noosphere.

Some stories on Tuesday morning include: a vertical video about a Palestinian jeweler using tear gas canisters for art by Matthew Cassel; the third part of a video interview with Marty Baron by Washington Post video journalist Joyce Koh; and event coverage by Dan Ming of a New York City protest against the Trump administration’s ban on healthcare for transgender minors. Aside from giving journalists a reliable stream of income (more on that below), Noosphere wants to, in its own way, democratize who gets to be a journalist.

“I look back at my colleagues in Afghanistan and Yemen, who were some of the greatest journalists in the country, who had all the contacts, all the know-how, all the language skills,” Ferguson said. “They’re the guys who made it happen. They were charismatic. So what if they had accents and didn’t ‘look like’ a network correspondent? They were putting out exclusives on Twitter and Instagram. These guys were breaking news stories, but instead handing them off to other correspondents to break. I would have put this in their hands and said, ‘Build your own audience. Cut out the middleman and fly.’”

Noosphere users pay $14.99 per month for access to all kinds of journalism, rather than paying smaller amounts to multiple journalists. (The subscription price will bump up to $19.99 in a few weeks, Ferguson said) Journalists get paid half of the subscription fee each time they refer a new paying subscriber to the app. After six months, Ferguson said Noosphere will taper the journalist’s half of the subscription fee into a “more equitable, traffic-based revenue share” to “distribute the money more fairly.”

When subscribers join Noosphere without a referral from a particular journalist, Noosphere will still only keep half of the subscription fee. The other half will go into a shared pool to be distributed to journalists down the line.

“If you look at other models like Substack, everyone’s siloed. They’re all competing for the same $6 or $8 per month,” Ferguson said. “It was very clear that we needed a bundling system where journalists could still take advantage of their own hard work and effectively monetize their own communities that had come to support them. That’s why we decided to build something where the journalist gets credit for bringing someone into the platform, but then that consumer gets everybody.”

Ferguson declined to share any numbers about users and subscriptions. The app seems to be geared toward people who prefer to get their news from individual personalities, on social media, and on specific topics. As more journalists eventually join the app, users will be able to follow their favorites to curate their own feeds. But right now, it’s a little dizzying to open the app and see Oscars coverage, a protest for transgender healthcare, an analysis on why Volodymyr Zelensky doesn’t wear a suit, and a first-person account of a journalist trying to return to Gaza from Egypt after the ceasefire deal. The stories are important, but it’s a lot to take in.

Journalists can post on Noosphere in their mediums of choice, like audio, video, photo, and text. Posts, however, only have a share button. They don’t have any engagement features like reactions or comments yet. Eventually, Ferguson wants subscribers and journalists to have meaningful discussions on the app, and the development team is working on an Ask-Me-Anything feature for journalists to answer users’ questions in the coming months.

Noosphere is invitation-only for journalists who want to post on the app. Ferguson and Walker are open bringing on both full-time staffers and freelancers. There’s no exclusivity clause either, so journalists can freely work for other outlets, but content they post to Noosphere has to be original and previously unpublished. Ferguson and Walker hand-picked the initial bullpen cohort and expect to increase the number of journalists from 15 to 50 in the next few months.

“We’re unapologetically exclusive in the sense that we curate the reporters. We look for people who have done really solid work,” Ferguson said. “When it comes to international reporting, we want to [focus on folks] based in the region — whether they’re a local reporter or a foreigner based in the region — who are multilingual, and multi-skilled in terms of multimedia. These are the things that matter to us, and as a result, we end up with this incredibly diverse and compelling group of people.”

Image created in Canva