This weekend, The Oberlin Review will launch its partnership with Newsreel, an alumni-founded startup that aims to increase news literacy on college campuses. Alumni Jack Brewster, OC ’18, and Julie Schreiber, OC ’19, return to campus today to give an entrepreneurial talk, hosted by the Business and Experiential Learning department, from 7–8 p.m. in Moffett Auditorium. Tomorrow, the Review x Newsreel partnership will culminate in a journalism career talk and Q&A from 10–11 a.m. in Dye Lecture Hall.
Newsreel is an app available for download that delivers national news in what Brewster and Schreiber describe as a more digestible medium than apps like The New York Times, which contain full, written articles as they appear in print. Instead, Newsreel’s news product synthesizes key points of a story and delivers them in a multimedia format. Users receive a notification that their daily news briefing is available and then swipe through the stories, almost like you would on Instagram. Each story contains a salient point, quote, or video. At the end of their briefing, users are quizzed on the information that they just received.
“Newsreel makes the news interactive, engaging, and fun,” Brewster said. “It takes the best of traditional news, the best of social media, and combines the two into one interactive experience. It’s taking the tools of the digital age and applying them to what is an experience that is still stuck in the 1990s. You know, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal produce wonderful journalism still, but mostly they’re just sticking their articles as text on a page. And what we’ve tried to do is update that experience to be something completely new.”
At Oberlin, Schreiber, who is currently the campus and community organizer for Newsreel, held a tenure as the Sports Editor of the Review, and Brewster, CEO and founder, was a staff writer for the News and Sports sections. Both student-athletes, Schreiber playing field hockey and Brewster baseball, the pair credited their involvement with Oberlin athletics for Newsreel’s inspiration.
“I think one of the reasons why Newsreel came together — I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we are athletes — was because we both found ourselves in roles in our athletic communities where people came to us to understand current events and world news,” Schreiber said.
In his senior year at Oberlin, Brewster conceptualized Newsreel while sitting in the Science Center writing his Politics honors thesis.
“I was writing about the future of news and how quality journalism could continue in the digital age,” Brewster said. “And at the same time, I was getting tons of questions from my teammates on the baseball team and elsewhere about the first Trump administration. It just felt like nobody could keep up, myself included. … That’s when I started to think, ‘Okay, if we were to create a new kind of news site, what would it do? How would it function?’ And the thing that I came up with was the concept of a news source that addressed people’s attention [spans] and sense of feeling overwhelmed. … The mission has always been the same: to help empower the next generation of news consumers and to bridge the gap between traditional journalism and new forms of journalism to create something that would appeal to this generation.”
Schreiber and Brewster kindled the concept as a passion project while pursuing more traditional careers in journalism after graduating from Oberlin. Brewster worked as a politics reporter for Forbes and as an enterprise editor at NewsGuard before launching the Newsreel concept full-time. Schreiber continued her career in sports journalism, and is currently an editor at The Next and The Equalizer, and a contributing writer at 5wins. Brewster waited for the right moment to finally introduce Newreel to the public.
“In the last year, I think we kind of hit that moment: the timing was perfect,” Brewster said. “We have a second-term Trump administration coming. The information ecosystem’s even more fractured than it was back in 2018. People feel more and more overwhelmed, and now there’s even a word for it. It’s called news avoidance. People everywhere are saying that they’re so fed up with the news and that they’re just tuning things out entirely.”
At Oberlin, students seem to resonate with this feeling of being overwhelmed by the news. College third-year Danielle Leydon spoke to the Review about her news habits.
“Well, I’m signed up to The New York Times emailing list, so a couple times a day I’ll get headlines that they will send to me,” Leydon said. “Usually, I won’t click on them, especially recently because there are just never any headlines that I want to click on. Sometimes I’ll read The Oberlin Review. … I have friends that work there, so I like to read what they write. But usually, I’m not super in-tune with the news unless it’s something that either directly affects me or it’s being talked about. … Of course, I also come across news while scrolling through TikTok or Instagram or Twitter.”
This sense of disengagement with news on college campuses is exactly the reason for Newreel’s partnership with the Review and other student-run newspapers on college campuses. Thus far, Newsreel is currently piloting its app at The Pennsylvania State University and Colgate University in addition to Oberlin College this semester.
“The other thing that we realized as we started to approach these schools is, not only do national news outlets have the problem of creating a consistent news reading habit with young people, but college newspapers do as well,” Brewster said. “And that’s why we’re doing what we are doing with The Oberlin Review. The Review and every other newspaper in the country still has their news reading experience on a desktop. We thought, ‘What better way to reach young people than by partnering with other young people?’”
Starting Monday, Feb. 24, Oberlin students who have downloaded the app will receive a weekly briefing made up of three Review news articles published that previous Friday.
“I think that Oberlin is a place where students are constantly discussing the big issues of the world, … and I think to have an app like Newsreel in your pocket to bolster or catalyze or enhance these conversations is going to make an already smart student body even smarter,” Schreiber said. “One of the big questions Jack and I have been trying to answer with Newsreel is: how do you make people interested in the news? How do you … make it easy and exciting for people to be interested? Building a genuine interest from people who want to be civically engaged and informed about the world is the great task of our lifetime.”
