Photo credit: Janet Donovan
Sidewire is not an electrical outlet, nor is it a movie about wine – that’s Sideways, starring Paul Giamatti. Sidewire is your hotline app to political news that cuts through ‘the noise’ and mindless chatter as it were. One reviewer – federalist92 – puts it this way: “I just learned about Sidewire from a few friends. This is like a private social channel to receive the inside gossip from actual newsmakers and top-tier journalists. Twitter is decent for jokes. Facebook is good for spam and whiny posts from distant relatives. Sidewire, on the other hand, is super fast, super informative, and gives you insider access to news and politics. I can send items to friends via a WhatsApp style feature. Or I can post juicy quotes to my own social media feed. This is perfect for the 2016 election, which I am already following assiduously. Really, really well done.”
Hollywood on the Potomac asked Meredith Carden (formerly an aide to First Lady Michelle Obama) at an event launch for Sidewire at the home of Juleanna Glover and Christopher Reiter hosted by Tim & Kiki Burger, Todd Harris & Ieva Augstums, Jennifer Maguire Isham, Joe & Giovanna Lockhart how the app came about. “Andy and Tucker met while they were at Facebook and Stanford respectively. They realized they had the same problem – cutting through the noise to find the most important news and what insiders were saying about it — in a clear feed.” Think Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard College roommates without the animosity. “People want to know the news better, and they want to do it on their phones.” We’re in.
Andy Bromberg, Meredith Carden, Tucker Bounds and Juleanna Glover
“Andy Bromberg (President and CEO) has built this application, and in many ways the engineering team, from the ground up,” said co-founder Tucker Bounds. “He is 51-years-old and according to the Federal Government he is actually 21-years-old, but he has been the driver behind our company and our product and we’re really proud at what we’re able to get out there in the market. Exactly two days ago we officially launched the product in Des Moines. We’re focused on building the audience there. We’re also focused on bringing the people that are insiders in Iowa to the people that are in this room. Many of you guys are using Sidewire and we really appreciate it. Many of you guys are driving it. We want more feedback on what we can be building so that we can all kind of experience how this thing comes together as a group, as a community. You all know each other. You know other people that are working in the news business that either are working to respond to news stories, that are creating news stories, that are analyzing news stories, all of you in this room, in some way, play a part in that.”
Andy Bromberg and Tim Burger
“Sidewire is for two types of people – news readers and news makers. Basically, everyone in here is a news maker…… in a relationship to content,” replied Andy. “The app is really a tool for all of you to share your stuff, increase your social reach, build tools to make that easier for you. If you know news makers that are not on the platform yet, let us know and we’ll get them on because we want to hear from them. At the same time we’re building this for news readers, building a place where readers can go and get that tape that they can’t find elsewhere, that’s really hard to find on noisy channels. We’re building this mobile application, which you should all download, if you have not yet. Sidewire, it’s in the app store for IOS, android soon. We’re building this place where people can go and get that tape they can’t find elsewhere from the people, like the people in this room, and hear those discussions.”
In between Sushi and Pizza, guests downloaded the Sidewire app
We asked Andy about the zillions of other apps out there: How are you going to fit into a crowded field? “Our thesis is that it’s really hard to find a signal in all the noise in a lot of these platforms,” he said. “We want to build a place where you can go as a reader to just get pure signal and nothing else, other than the insight from the people matching in with what you’re talking about. Standing out for us is a matter of getting to people who have relationships that are on the application, on the platform so they can share that insight that they just can’t get anywhere else. Part of what we believe is that you can get headlines in a lot of places, but it’s really hard to find that meaning and that analysis about what’s actually going on from people that know. Building a place where you can get that analysis and not just from headlines is what we’re trying to build. We’re not building a news aggregator, we’re not building a place where you can just go see what’s happening, we’re building a place where you can understand why those things matter to you, and why they matter to the world.”
Right now, they don’t plan to broaden their scope of interests. “There’s no reason we couldn’t expand our scope, but we’re entirely focused on politics and the people who are reporting, responding to, and analyzing the news around the 2016 election,” said Carden. We, of course, are waiting for the Hollywood channel.
