Nicholas Carlson has witnessed spectacular failures in the tech and media worlds over the years. As the former top editor of Business Insider, he chronicled the carnage at Yahoo and Groupon, and then watched several Silicon Valley companies and rival publications make an ill-fated “pivot to video.”
Now Mr. Carlson, 41, is trying to put the lessons he learned to good use. He is preparing to debut a media start-up of his own — one with a focus on video.
The new company, Dynamo, is betting big on the growing popularity of video on platforms such as YouTube, TikTok and LinkedIn. It will produce “cinematic” video stories for those platforms, Mr. Carlson said, focusing on business journalism for a core group of strivers that he calls “dynamos.”
The average dynamo — Mr. Carlson considers himself one — is an ambitious, career-oriented viewer who believes that business can explain the world.
And he is quick to assert that his new company has more in common with Mr. Beast, the mega-popular YouTube star, than it does with Facebook Watch, a video service that was shuttered after struggling for years.
“We’re not pivoting to video,” Mr. Carlson said with a laugh. “We’re cannonballing into the deep end of video.”
Many media companies that have created content specifically for social media platforms have had a tough road. But Mr. Carlson said skyrocketing video viewership on tech platforms pointed to a business opportunity that had not been tapped by companies specializing in high-quality video journalism.
In addition to Mr. Beast, Mr. Carlson cited the tech journalist Cleo Abram, who has roughly 4.4 million subscribers on YouTube, and Dropout, the independent digital comedy channel previously known as CollegeHumor. The company intends to take advantage of a video news product that is being developed by LinkedIn.
Mr. Carlson said videos produced by Dynamo would be “evergreen” — designed to be relevant months or years after they were published — with memorable characters and great writing that could be illustrated by compelling footage. Two examples: How do massive container ships shrug off giant waves? And why have sculptors recently cast such meme-worthy statues of popular athletes like the N.B.A. great Dwyane Wade and the soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo?
Mr. Carlson said the start-up would avoid political stories. And it will leave daily news coverage to other publishers.
“There’s a lot of companies that do it well,” said Mr. Carlson, who will be the editor in chief and chief executive of Dynamo. “That’s just a very difficult business to get into. And I think there’s plenty of other amazing, very valuable journalism to be done.”
Mr. Carlson, a father of two who lives in Brooklyn, firmed up the concept for Dynamo last year on a family vacation in Spain. He trademarked the name — his wife’s idea — that fall.
But he didn’t become serious about leaving Business Insider, where he rose from a staff writer to the top editor over a 16-year tenure, until this spring.
That was months after he and Business Insider came under intense scrutiny. In January, the site published a series of articles that leveled accusations of plagiarism against Neri Oxman, an academic married to the hedge fund manager Bill Ackman. Mr. Ackman complained, prompting Axel Springer, the parent company of Business Insider, to announce that it would be reviewing the articles.
In the aftermath, Mathias Dopfner, Axel Springer’s chief executive, raised the possibility of firing Mr. Carlson in a meeting of the company’s management board, according to three people familiar with the matter. (Semafor reported earlier that Mr. Dopfner considered firing Mr. Carlson.) The company’s review ultimately concluded the articles were accurate and fair.
In May, Mr. Carlson announced his intentions to leave Business Insider, negotiating an exit that included a consulting deal with Axel Springer.
Mr. Carlson said he made the change because of Dynamo’s potential, not the tumult at Business Insider.
“Axel Springer obviously reacted to that story,” Mr. Carlson said. “And it was a challenge to work through it. But we did.” (A Business Insider spokeswoman said in a statement that the company was “enormously grateful” to Mr. Carlson.)
As he was leaving Business Insider, Mr. Carlson sounded out Henry Blodget, the former chief executive of the company, on his next steps. In September, Mr. Blodget joined Dynamo as an investor and future board member and helped Mr. Carlson raise $3.4 million from backers including Jessica Lessin, the founder of The Information; FirstMark Capital; Jon Steinberg; and Alyson Shontell, the top editor of Fortune.
Over the last few weeks, during a series of lengthy phone calls, Mr. Blodget, 58, and Mr. Carlson batted ideas for Dynamo back and forth. One frequent topic: managing each video to make sure that costs are in line with the revenue they generate. That focus is one of the big lessons from the 2010s, Mr. Blodget said, when start-ups like Vice Media and BuzzFeed News lost millions of dollars annually.
“It is not easy by any means,” Mr. Blodget said. “But what the companies need to do is figure out a model that works with the consumption patterns and the revenue that is available.”
What lessons from his two decades of covering business will Mr. Carlson, a first-time founder, bring to his own company?
Mr. Carlson — whose early reporting coups included obtaining scatological college instant messages from Mark Zuckerberg — said that successful start-ups raised realistic amounts of money, made things that people actually wanted and spent less on their products than they generated.
“Now I just have to figure how to do that profitably when so many others with hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal could not,” Mr. Carlson said. “Here goes!”
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