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When the news media startup Caliber first launched in October 2022, I was initially skeptical.
Originally called The News Movement, the brand embraced a commercial and editorial strategy that knowingly ran counter to the prevailing wisdom of the time.
Rather than shepherding social audiences toward owned-and-operated websites, it was content to meet them where they were, deploying vertical video that met followers in their feeds. It eschewed any form of subscription revenue, offered no newsletters, and barely produced any written material.
Three-and-a-half years later, the company has evolved, though only a bit.
The News Movement launched a holding company, called Caliber, to house its growing portfolio of media brands, which now includes The Recount, the lifestyle newsletter Capsule, and its creative studio Caliber Collective.
One of its cofounders, Will Lewis, also left the company to become the chief executive of The Washington Post, a departure that felt like inauspicious at the time but now appears to have been a blessing in disguise, given his uninspiring tenure at the publisher.
But other than that, the core mission of Caliber remains unchanged.
The media brand believes that traditional news organizations have for too long worked to bend consumers to their legacy modes of output, rather than create content that people actually want to consume.
That creed made Caliber an early and fervent adopter of vertical video, which has become ubiquitous in the years since its launch. Now, nearly every major news outlet has a dedicated tab on its app devoted to scrollable video, a concept Caliber embraced from the outset. It might have taken a while, in other words, but eventually the industry caught up to Caliber.
So when Ramin Beheshti, the cofounder and CEO of the company, invited me to their office in Flatiron to demo an early version of its new vertical video app, SaySo, I tried to be less skeptical this time around.
