Yehong Zhu, CEO of Zette, on launching and growing a news media startup

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This week, major local news group Reach plc announced looming job cuts citing an 'online attention recession'. A scathing piece by Media Voices this week offered a counterview: that a business model driven by clickbait content and overstuffing webpages with ads is a recipe for dwindling attention and loyalty.

This is an issue that Yehong Zhu recognised when she worked as a business journalist at Forbes Magazine. Both the user experience and the journalist's pride in their work were damaged by overzealous programmatic advertising.

So she came up with an alternative. She had grown up as an entrepreneur and worked across various tech companies. Little did she know she had all the skills and experience to launch Zette. It is a US-based bundled news subscription platform that raised $1.7m in pre-seed funding in 2021 and has 100 publications signed up as clients.

In this week's podcast, Zhu talks about taking an idea for a startup from conception to execution. At a time when we are in desperate need of alternative news models, she offers inspiration for journalists to take old gems of ideas off the shelf and launch them into the world.

Coming up are tips on developing your inner-entrepreneur, from getting the ball moving with your ideas to seeking venture capital investment. The good news is that now is the time for news startups to start pitching.  

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