Laura Carpenter, CEO of Abridge News, a Boston-born digital media startup that went through the MassChallenge Boston accelerator in 2018, has decided to pull the plug, citing challenges in sustaining the business.
The decision was effective on Dec. 11, after approximately three years of operation. The startup bootstrapped at first, then turned to nonprofit status.
"Providing different perspectives is absolutely worth it," she said. "The challenge is to do it in a sustainable way."
Carpenter, 29, launched Abridge News with co-founder David Byas-Smith while she was getting her MBA at Harvard Business School in 2017. Her goal was to "increase empathy in the world by providing different perspective," she said. At closure, the startup operated a site with a number of visitors "in the low single-digit thousands" every month, a newsletter with over 1,000 subscribers and an iOS app, she said.
Through these different channels, and with a team of 10 part-time employees, Abridge News would aggregate, comment and rank on a liberal-conservative scale stories from different news outlets, with a focus on one big topic a day. Recently, the team produced newsletters around Pope Francis' civil union comments, the Department of Justice suing Google and the Breonna Taylor verdict.
Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst for the Poynter Institute, said in an interview that three years of operation for a startup constitutes "giving it a good try." But he also pointed out what might have been the root cause of Abridge News shutting down. "Plenty of surveys done by Pew, and others, unfortunately, seem to suggest that there are a lot of people who really don't want to hear the other side," he said.
A Pew Research Center analysis showed that traffic to digital-native news sites has plateaued in recent years, making it hard for new players to carve their slice of online audience. The pandemic has also accelerated a decline in advertising revenue within the media industry.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, digital-native news outlets, as well as traditional news organizations, have gone through multiple waves of layoffs. In New England, Gannett’s cost-cutting measures have taken a toll on its papers in the Boston area, with more than a dozen journalists at four of its local dailies taking buyouts in recent weeks.
However, Carpenter said the pandemic didn't affect Abridge News, which has been "a virtual company from the start." She didn't apply for a Paycheck Protection Program loan, but in June this year converted the business to a nonprofit. "The truth is that we needed full-time staff to push Abridge News to the heights we had envisioned," Carpenter and the team wrote in the startup's farewell message.
Carpenter, who has been working full-time for a consulting firm based in Arlington, Va. for the past two years, said she still believes in the mission of Abridge News.
"We're happy to be a drop in the bucket," she said.
