Flipboard chief executive Mike McCue is unlikely to get hauled in front of the US Senate any time soon. The founder of the Palo Alto-based news and social content aggregator is an evangelist for quality content, using a combination of trained journalists and algorithms to weed out "fake news" on its platform.
“We want us to help find the good stuff and filter out the stuff that is fake. We have processes we use to make those editorial calls and they are made by people who are trained journalists that we have hired – we believe this is fundamental,” he says.
In contrast to Palo Altos best known social media giant Facebook which started life in a Harvard dorm room as a hot-or-not style rating site, McCues vision for Flipboard has been focused from day one on providing a platform for high-quality editorial content presented in an accessible and engaging way.
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McCue describes Facebook as “an incredible platform for staying connected to your friends and family,” but says “where they have got into challenges is where they have tried to be an information provider.”
McCue says that if Facebook continues to focus on acting as a platform for content as well as a social media site it will need to invest heavily in beefing up its editorial staff.
“They will have to figure that out,” he says, “to the extent they want to double down on Facebook making a profit from informing people, they will have to do more and more with integrating journalists into the mix and making editorial judgement calls. I believe if you go down that path you have a responsibility that the content that is informing people is high-quality and its accurate.”
In-flight inspiration
Flipboard, which was inspired by the traditional media experience, has not had the same problems as Facebook with "fake news" on its platform.
McCue says he first came up with idea for Flipboard while reading a magazine on a flight.
The magazine “was a really high-quality experience,” he says, “I loved the graphics, the typography, the advertising was really great.”
After he landed he tracked down one of the articles had had read online and it “was a shadow of itself”.
“It was broken apart into nine or 10 webpages you had to click through, the photos were in a separate gallery to drive page views and the ads had nothing to do with the topic of the article.”
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“I looked at this and was like, wow, a great story written by a high-quality journalist in a great publication, but when it is published online everyone loses. The reader loses, the advertisers are losing, the publisher loses because the advertising dollars are substantially less. The whole experience is nowhere near as good as print.”
McCue, a serial tech entrepreneur, says that this inspired him to bring the magazine experience to the online world.
“We wanted to build a company that venerates great content and made that content look as good as it could but on a mobile phone,” he says.
Eight years on the company has hit 100m users, suggesting that McCue is not alone in his desire to see high-quality content, sympathetically presented.
Personalised experience
As well as focusing on slick presentation, Flipboard also aims to provide a personalised experience for readers.
Publishers (including City A.M.) can apply to be part of the platform, they are then vetted by the company to ensure quality and if they pass, their content will be available on the site.
Readers chose topics they are interested in and then receive a feed of stories that is partly chosen by Flipboards own journalists and partly by its algorithm which use machine learning to suggest stories that a reader will want to see based on their past browsing habits.
According to McCue, this personalised approach is leading to readers “getting more and more engaged and spending more time on it.”
When asked if he would follow tech players such as Facebook and Dropbox onto the public markets McCue says it is the “logical next step”, but says the company has “lots of building to do before we go down that path”.
For now McCue just seems to be enjoying himself: “This is an amazing company, the best company I have ever been a part of…I finally found a start-up that I believe is the right opportunity at the right time and I am here for the long haul,” he says.
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CityAM
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