More than one in five Americans regularly receive news from social media creators. 

Recent Pew Research Center data shows that 21% of U.S. adults get their news from individual content creators rather than institutions, with this figure jumping to 37% among adults aged 18-29. On TikTok alone, 52% of American users (17% of all U.S. adults) regularly consume news content.

Jane Ferguson recognized this shift after 15 years as a war correspondent for PBS NewsHour, The New Yorker, and other major news outlets. 

The Emmy, Peabody, Polk, and DuPont award-winning journalist now serves as founder and CEO of Noosphere, a platform launched in January 2024 that enables journalists to directly monetize their work in the creator economy.

“If legacy media organizations die — and I certainly don’t celebrate that because these are incredible news organizations that I’ve worked with and loved my whole life — the question I asked myself was, ‘Can we allow that to happen but just keep the journalists working?’” Jane asks.

Catalyst for Change

Jane’s assessment of journalism’s current state comes from frontline observation. After covering conflicts and humanitarian crises across the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Africa, she identified a misdiagnosis in how the industry viewed its declining audience.

“We’ve all known that the ratings are going down when you work in TV news. This has been a phenomenon for nearly a decade now,” Jane explains. “But we hadn’t been very clear on where they were going. Sometimes there was this assumption, ‘Oh, people aren’t interested in the news,’ which social media proved is not true. I mean, news is all over social media. People can’t get enough of it.”

The catalyst for Noosphere came during the 2021 Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. As Jane covered the evacuation crisis from Kabul airport, she found herself filing nightly for PBS NewsHour while simultaneously posting updates on social media.

“Throughout the day, I was putting up videos on Instagram and updates on Twitter, and frankly, those were exploding,” she recalls. “So much so that some of the news organizations, some of the broadcasters, started actually using my Instagram videos because they had no access to footage.”

This experience revealed both audience location and the potential for direct distribution: “That really showed me how I could reach that audience without a network. The sense of disintermediation really started to dawn on me at that moment.”

Entering the Creator Economy

Noosphere tackles journalism’s structural challenges by providing purpose-built infrastructure for professional journalists to thrive in the creator economy. 

The platform and app offer a two-sided marketplace: a home for journalists to build and monetize their communities and a destination for audiences seeking high-quality, trusted content.

“We are effectively creating architecture that truly allows journalists to enter the content creator economy,” Jane says. “It’s a home where journalists can come in and build their communities around them and their ability to monetize that community effectively.”

What distinguishes Noosphere from individual subscription newsletters is its collective approach. Subscribers gain access to all journalists on the platform rather than paying separately for each one. This model removes competition between journalists for limited subscription dollars while offering audiences broader value.

“The consumer gets to come in and have closer access to this journalist that they follow on the road, whether that’s behind-the-scenes work as well as their process and then obviously all their reporting,” Jane explains. “They also get to know that their subscription is directly supporting that reporter. And on top of all of that, they access the platform and get everything there.”

For journalists, Noosphere represents a mindset shift rather than a radical reinvention. “Journalists have always been content creators. None of this is new,” Jane notes. “All we’re doing is cutting out the middleman.”

She draws from her own experience: “For years, I was in the field. By the end of my career, I was overseeing and doing many edits and writing the script. I mean, I was effectively delivering a product.” 

The essential change is journalists “taking control of the distribution” and “stepping into the economics of that role.”

Designed By Journalists, For Journalists

Noosphere stands apart in the platform market through its development approach: it’s built with continual input from working journalists.

“What’s been the most rewarding experience of all of this is going into weekly meetings with our dev team in San Francisco and bringing journalists in,” Jane says. “They’ll zoom in from Kyiv or Washington D.C. or anywhere around the world. They could be an award-winning photographer from National Geographic or a writer on the front lines.”

This collaborative process, she adds, yields practical innovations: “They come in and say, ‘Actually, what if we put audio capabilities above this photo gallery?’ Or ‘What if we’re able to answer the public’s questions with audio messages instead of having to sit and write them?’”

The result is a platform that serves journalists’ specific needs while creating stakeholders in its success. “It’s designed and built by journalists, but will remain an actual life force that we change and update all the time,” Jane explains.

Reimagining the User Experience

For audiences, Noosphere reimagines how people consume news content. Through testing with university students, Jane discovered specific preferences that differ from both traditional news sites and existing social platforms.

According to her findings, young users highlighted “this sort of breaking down of the third wall between you and the reporter” as particularly compelling. They appreciated that “the content is substantive, serious, and real” while being delivered in a conversational style. 

As Jane explains, “Some beta testers would say it feels like a reporter is just FaceTiming me. And that’s really cool.”

The platform’s interface reflects this user feedback: “We wanted the experience of many social media platforms, whether TikTok or Instagram, where you scroll through chronologically. You want to be updated on what’s new.” 

This system contrasts with traditional news sites where users “have to search through and remember what you read or what you didn’t.”

Jane also identified underlying problems with online news consumption: “As online ad revenue has absolutely tanked in recent years, it’s just nightmarish when you’re trying to read a news source on either your phone or your laptop because of the number of pop-up ads everywhere. It’s just like you can’t see the text.”

Noosphere addresses this by embracing a subscription model: “That’s why we wanted to lean into the subscription model as well so we could have this incredibly clean UX. There’s very little busy branding pop-ups noise. It’s a very sleek experience.”

The Entrepreneurial Learning Curve

Jane’s transition from war correspondent to tech founder has required a fast pace of learning. 

“The last 18 months of my life has been a pace of learning that I’ve never experienced before,” she acknowledges. “And that includes going off and covering new countries and new conflicts.”

The challenge wasn’t just acquiring business skills but adapting her mindset. “When you are used to doing not just one thing but several things with a degree of excellence, you’re used to bringing these extremely high standards into your life,” she explains. “You cannot ace them all. That has been my biggest challenge: not beating myself up about it.”

Her advice reflects this experience: “Pick two things every day that are most important to the company and don’t beat yourself up about the other things.” 

She emphasizes focusing on solutions rather than problems: “Every day, you will face maybe 12 challenges. Two will be gut-wrenching. The only way through it is to constantly focus on solutions and not obsess about problems.”

Global Expansion and Beyond News

While Noosphere launched with a focus on breaking news content, Jane’s vision extends much further. 

“We’re very keen to expand into high-quality lifestyle content, evergreen content, especially when it comes to food and cooking,” she explains. “We’re super interested in comedy, especially political satire.”

The company’s expansion plans are global. “We will open in the United Kingdom this summer, then Canada, India, and Nigeria,” Jane shares. 

These aren’t just markets for American journalists to reach—they represent opportunities to serve local audiences: “We would be looking to serve those communities themselves where these locally-based journalists have huge social media followings and loyal fans.”

Jane sees particular potential in regions where mobile technology adoption has outpaced traditional media infrastructure: “Many parts of the world are actually much more advanced when it comes to mobile technology and connecting directly to your audience on social media rather than through the traditional platforms.”

A Blueprint for the Future

Noosphere represents what Jane describes as a new way forward journalism distribution.

After informally incubating the concept at Princeton University’s entrepreneurship department while she was teaching in the nearby Journalism Program as a Professor of Journalism, Jane is now implementing her vision for how journalism can develop beyond institutional constraints.

The platform’s name reflects its mission. Inspired by French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the “noosphere”—representing a layer of collective human consciousness—it speaks to Jane’s goal of creating meaningful human connections through storytelling.

“Our mission is to truly connect people across the globe through extremely high-quality human-generated content,” Jane explains. “Whether that’s over cooking or current affairs or travel. What we’re really looking at is high-quality storytelling and connecting human beings.”

By creating this “global network of storytellers and newsmakers,” Jane aims to preserve the essential value of journalism while adapting to the reality of changing media consumption habits.

“I looked at tech-based solutions and how we reach audiences these days,” Jane says. “I realized that not only can we save journalists and journalism, but actually we could usher in a new era of success for journalists and build business models that could actually make them once again discover lucrative careers.”