By Jared Fesler and Chase Palmieri

As the founders of Tribeworthy – two business graduates and a software developer – we may seem an unlikely team to challenge the news media solutions being offered today.

In fact, people keep asking, “How did you three fall so deep down the media literacy rabbit hole? And what is Tribeworthy?”

Jared Fesler (Brand Manager), Chase Palmieri (CEO), Austin Walter (Product Manager)

The three of us were experiencing a shared problem, while each of us was attempting to solve the problem in our own way. The problem is trying to identify which authors or news organizations to trust online. When the majority of Americans, from the left to the right, have reached historic levels of distrust in media, we know something has to change.

Drawing upon our experience in the restaurant business, we stumbled upon our “AHA!” moment: If Yelp is a review platform for businesses to receive constructive criticism from their customers, what if news consumers could hold media organizations accountable in the same way?

From our business school training, we understand that trust is built by seeing how peers make unincentivized decisions about a product or service. The challenge then became, how do we ensure that users remain objective with their reviews and don’t resort to party politics? As the founders of Tribeworthy, we all have different political ideologies so we wanted a platform that didn’t favor any political party or any individual founder’s views.

That’s when critical media literacy became our north star.

Realizing we needed to change the mentality of how people interact with the media, we set out to build an interactive community of critical thinkers called “Crowd Contested Media.”  Crowdsourcing critical media literacy became a way to connect our ‘Tribe’ of users with their desire for ‘trustworthy’ sources – and so became our online startup, Tribeworthy.

Rather than focusing on metrics such as Likes, Shares, Clicks, Views, and Ad Revenue, we need to create the people’s measure of media success. Join us on a sincere mission to reclaim our trust in media, and help us build a more objective and logical online world.

Tribeworthy Launches January 20, 2017

To learn more, visit Tribeworthy’s Educators page.

Follow us on Twitter: @Tribeworthy