Newsy hires “prominent St. Louis journalist”
I feel better about the climate for startup businesses in Missouri after meeting Jim Spencer, president and founder of Newsy. He moved the company to Columbia, Mo., a year ago from the San Francisco Bay area, and has since increased its staff to 19 from the original four.
One hundred percent of Newsy’s financing, Spencer says, came from within the state. He launched the company with $700,000 from angel investors, and has embarked on an effort to raise $2.1 million more. The company also benefited from state tax credits, and it has a partnership with the University of Missouri Journalism School.
Newsy delivers news videos over its website and over mobile phones. It bills itself as “multiperspective online video news site,” which means its staff-produced videos incorporate clips from various other news sources. Spencer compared the growth of Internet video today to the growth of search engines back in 1998 and 1999, when he was a vice president at Ask Jeeves.
Spencer spoke at a meeting of the Society of Professional Jounalists‘ local chapter. He dropped one interesting news tip: Within a couple of weeks, he said, Newsy expects to add a prominent St. Louis journalist to its staff.
Update: Pam Maples, former managing editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, appears to be the journalist Spencer was talking about. Maples’ LinkedIn profile says she is the VP/editorial at Newsy.
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David Nicklaus has covered St. Louis business for more than 25 years. His column appears three days a week on the Post-Dispatch business page. 
This is an excellent concept but I hope Newsy contracts to use the material from other news sources that it presents. I know when Newsy started, it was relying on the concept of fair use to reproduce the material. I think that’s questionable legally and ethically. Regardless of that issue, I hope Newsy moves toward a model of permission-based use, thereby allowing Newsy to broaden the scope of source material it reproduces in its reports.
Prominent, professional and journalist-interesting words but don’t
necessarily go together. .
When I asked Pam Maples, upon her arrival, to help make the Post pro-active on reopening Kiel Opera House she said…’I passed by that building and wondered about it’. So, she wondered about it for what..3 years?
A prominent, professional journalist would have done something about it.