Petaluma startup fights fake news

Tribeworthy lets readers rate news stories based on veracity.|

Last Thursday, in a garage tucked away on Edith Street, three Petalumans launched a startup that aims to redefine how news is consumed.

The startup is Tribeworthy, a website that allows users to rate the overall trustworthiness of news articles, a process coined by its founders as “crowd-contested media.” Users have the option of rating articles according to five main criteria including bias, factual errors and click bait headlines. Articles can also be uploaded individually by users, which are then subject to reviews and ratings.

The end result, the founders hope, is to combat the pervasiveness of so-called fake news.

“What we’re building is a social network specifically for news consumers,” CEO Chase Palmieri said.

The launch is the culmination of months of work, divided among Palmieri, Brand Manager Jared Fesler and Lead Software Developer and Product Manager Austin Walter.

Prior to creating Tribeworthy the founders said they felt frustrated with the dearth of trustworthy online news content. The trio is not alone in their dissatisfaction with the current media landscape. According to a 2016 Gallup poll, only 32 percent of Americans trust mass media, the lowest number in Gallup polling history.

“There’s not a lack of information,” Palmieri said. “We just don’t know who to trust or how to quickly find the good from the bad.”

Tribeworthy’s emphasis on crowd-sourced ratings is constructed as a remedy for pervasive distrust in mass media. The group likens it to platforms like Yelp and Rotten Tomatoes, which users rely upon to make decisions about restaurants, movies and a host of other services. The Tribeworthy score is meant to similarly serve as a reliable and enjoyable reference for news consumers.

“I remember when Chase first approached me with the idea,” Walter said. “We sit down and he tells me about Tribeworthy and I think, ‘Yeah it’s a good idea, but it has to have been done before.’”

Walter searched online but discovered there was nothing like what Palmieri proposed.

“I realized this was an unmet need,” Walter said. “That was the realization moment for me, that this hasn’t been done, (that) it doesn’t exist … and it should.”

The idea morphed into a fledgling company in January 2016, which drew from the founders’ experience in business, entrepreneurship and software engineering.

The next step was to choose a home base for the company. Palmieri campaigned for Petaluma. At the time, Palmieri was living in Italy while Fesler and Walter were in Redding and Sacramento, respectively.

“I’ve always been around here,” Palmieri said. “My Dad’s restaurant is Risibisi and that’s why we moved here, so that we could work there on an as-needed basis to cover the cost of going for the startup.”

In August 2016, the group moved into a house in central Petaluma. There they immersed themselves in the challenges and rewards of creating a new company and online platform.

“The daily grind of it is brutal,” Palmieri said. “You have to say no to everything that doesn’t have to do with the success of your (startup).”

On the day of Tribeworthy’s launch this past week, Fesler said the platform had 200 registered users. Although the first milestone of the project arrived with the launch of the site June 15, the trio is keeping one eye on the future.

“Just as Google helps us find information, Tribeworthy’s ultimate long term goal is to connect you to the most trusted information,” Palmieri said.

According to Forbes, nine out of ten startups fail, with the lack of market need cited as the top cause. However, the founders of Tribeworthy have a less shortsighted concept of success.

“Whether or not Tribeworthy as a company is successful is I think less important than the idea that this is how we need to start evaluating news,” Walter said.

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