Newsana was an online community of experts and thought leaders who shared, discussed and worked together to choose the five most essential news stories and ideas of the day on topics of their expertise. An expert-led and credibility-weighted news aggregator, Newsana filtered out the noise and aimed at bringing the most meaningful news of interest to its users.

Newsana was born from an initiative I created while working at the non-profit Journalists for Human Rights, called Make Media Matter. Based on the reception we received co-founder Ben Peterson and I, decided to pivot this campaign into a product, along with partnerships from news agencies, educational institutes and other related organizations. We raised over $500k in our initial seed funding round, and created a lean team, consisting of a community manager and developers. The resulting website and mobile app allowed individuals to share, consume and vote on the news of the day, re-sulting in a ”Top 5 Most Essential” list of media for everyone. Newsana was sold to Relish Interactive in late 2013.