Newark’s social-media-savvy mayor is diving into the digital game. Cory Booker tells Fast Company he’s teaming up with Silicon Valley veterans to create a video site that will energize and engage Millennials around news and information that they care about, but in ways that traditional forms of media are not currently tapping into.
#waywire, backed by Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Josh Kopelman‘s First Round Capital, and Lady Gaga manager Troy Carter, will feature both professional video (aggregated from media partners and produced by #waywire) as well as content created by users themselves.
Millennials “want to see news and information coming not only from trusted news sources,” says Booker (pictured, right). They also want to see “opinions, ideas, and values that other people have about [that news and information].”
The site will give users the ability to publish their own videos, to create their own streams (their own “wires,” as it were), and publish those out to their social networks. (Think of it as a partially user-generated Funny or Die, but for news and social issues, with Pinterest/Twitter-style social dynamics.)
“We created a platform–a new social stream–for consuming information and ideas,” Booker says. “But also for individuals to engage in that information and to participate in a more significant way.”
Booker (an early social media adopter whose tweets rallied Newark during 2010’s Snowpocalypse) is teaming up with Yahoo veteran and former Gilt Groupe executive Nathan Richardson and Sarah Ross, the digital marketing guru who got Ashton Kutcher to be the first person on Twitter with 1 million followers. Booker will be an adviser, but the mayor, who already has a demanding full-time job, won’t be involved in day-to-day operations.
