Our Mission

Our mission is to inform and educate the public about the important events that shape our society.

We are building a new kind of news organization that combines AI technology, objective methodology, and human research to discover and analyze newsworthy information: Determining the important current events based on their impact to society, framing the stories objectively, identifying the pertinent facts, and surfacing the primary sources that validate each fact.

This is the opposite of news media content today, where news outlets select and frame stories that align with their partisan agenda, write headlines that create fear and outrage to engage their audience, confuse the truth by portraying opinion as if it were fact, and obscuruing their sources.

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Why is Citable different?

Technology
Our Fact Mining Engine continuously seeks out newsworthy events, developing story leads for our research team, and identifying the factual claims.
Method
We have adopted a rigorous, objective methodology for selecting events to cover, framing stories, and developing our content. Our method eliminates bias at every step.
People
Our staff of expert researchers investigates each story, validates each claim, and locates primary sources that support each fact.

 


Our Fact Mining Engine continuously reads newsworthy information from dozens of sources including government institutions, news wires, social media, and local and International outlets. The content is analyzed using Natural Language Processing (NLP), identifying facts about each story. Our research team verifies these facts and provides them to you in an easy to read news brief with links to the primary sources that validate each fact.

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People don’t trust the news

The news media caters to political parties and their polarized ideologies – partnering with them to share the benefits of stoking fear, discontent, and contempt for the other tribe. And everybody knows it.

Today’s news content is measured by social media vanity metrics: Accumulating views, clicks, likes, comments, and shares. For national news outlets, the preferred content strategy for racking up vanity metrics is to present a false reality: Selectively exaggerating and emphasizing information such that stories appear more dramatic, provocative, sensational, and entertaining than they really are.

We don’t trust the mainstream news. Maybe you don’t trust them either. That’s why we built Citable.

Our Values

Transparency.
Truth is not easy to know, and bias is not easy to overcome. But that doesn’t mean these aren’t important goals. We believe the best way for news organizations like our own to overcome bias is to be transparent about our process, to be humble when we fall short, and to constantly seek to improve our methods.

Impartiality.
Although truth is not easy to know, and bias is not easy to overcome, we are dedicated to delivering the news with no agenda other than to inform. We are a politically diverse team of researchers, designers, and engineers. And although we have our own personal views, we are committed to extreme impartiality. It is not our job to tell you what to think.

Humanism.
We do what we do out of a love and respect for humanity. The media often sees people as pawns to be convinced by an agenda, or inoculated against other political movements. We believe that the news should respect the reader and not attempt to sway them — it should inform, and respect its readers’ right to have their own opinions.

Our Team

Joel Trammell
Serial entrepreneur, private equity investor, successful CEO, author, and publisher.
Joel provides mentoring, business oversight, and pursues Citable strategic business development opportunities and alliances.

Jerry Frain
GM & product executive at global high-tech companies ARRIS, BMC Software, CPA Global. Key technical contributor at Austin start-ups Tivoli, Motive, Mirage Networks.

Shaun Cammack
Methodologist, qualitative researcher, editor, founder of the Narratives Project. Shaun oversees our methodology and analysis activities. He received his MA from the University of Chicago.

Ben Byrne
Media communication expert, copywriter, and researcher with global experience, Ben oversees the Citable newsroom team activities and is responsible for the production of our content.

John Goff
With broad experience across product design at eBay, PayPal, BMC Software, and various Product Design Agencies. John brings a wealth of product and user experience focus to Citable.