Our story
Citable was founded by an experienced team of high tech entrepreneurs in Austin, Texas. The inspiration for Citable came from our founder’s experience engaging with the media in his youth. He grew up in a household that watched Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America,” each night on CBS Evening News. He vividly recalls the impact that Cronkite’s retirement had on the news: News that was once presented in an impartial way now introduced subjectivity.
In the following years, the rise of the cable and satellite television networks led to the innovation of the 24×7 news cycle, where volumes of commentary began to be saturate news programming because there just isn’t enough real news to fill more than a few hours a day.
People don’t trust the news today
For the majority of news outlets and news aggregators today — including social media platforms — consumer attention, not information, is the truly valuable commodity.
Mainstream and social media made a Faustian pact with the advertising economy that has led to the profitable but inevitable, irreversible, logical conclusion: News is now dominated by partisan opinion and sensational journalism — where audiences are ensnared in echo chambers, continuously fed content that elicits a strong emotional reaction and confirms their own bias.
The result is a fractured news industry whose members engage only with consumers whose views align with their own. Critical-thinking consumers who want fact-based news — from which they can form their own opinions — have nowhere to go.
Our Vision
Inspired by Cronkite’s legacy, we envision a world where people operate on a shared set of facts about important issues of the day, that enables and encourages people to participate in intelligent, civil discourse to solve society’s most pressing problems.
We intend to help create this future by becoming the trusted arbiter of the unvarnished truth about important current events and social issues that shape our world.
Our goal is to amplify facts and help society to rise above the bias, opinion, drama, petty bickering, and divisiveness in today’s news and social media that is fundamentally driven by sensational behavior to compete for advertising revenue.