Caliber runs a media company in formats Gen Z understands and a social media agency under one holding company, both drawing on the same audience the newsroom builds.

“How do you take the principles of quality journalism, well researched, well reported, but deliver the output in a way that’s interesting and engaging to younger audiences?” Ramin Beheshti, the company’s co-founder and CEO, describes the founding premise.

Ramin spent four years as Chief Product and Technology Officer at Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, where he helped open new revenue lines and pushed WSJ digital subscriptions up more than 80% between 2019 and 2020. He co-founded The News Movement in 2021 with a group of former WSJ colleagues, betting that a generation getting its news from social media would still want rigor, if it arrived in a format built for them.

The News Movement now reaches more than 100 million people a month, by Ramin’s account, 70% of them under 40 and a majority female, a demographic mix he describes as the inverse of a traditional newsroom’s. The company acquired The Recount, a U.S. politics outlet, around 2023, and built a social agency called The Caliber Collective to apply what it had learned about digital storytelling to brand work. In September 2025, those units and a creator app called SaySo were folded into a new parent company, Caliber, with Ramin as CEO.

“We take all of the data and the learnings from producing content ourselves, how to tell stories, and apply that to brands,” Ramin says of the agency’s original pitch.

The Newsroom’s Formats Are the Agency’s Sales Pitch 

Two examples show how the mechanic works in practice. “Hustle Diaries,” a News Movement series about people making money alongside a day job, and “Margin of Error,” a Recount politics show on YouTube that Ramin says built a large following, both started as pure audience plays. Once each proved it could hold attention, Caliber began selling sponsors a spot inside the format itself, often through a host read.

The larger business, according to Ramin, runs through The Caliber Collective. Not every piece of content The News Movement or The Recount publishes drives revenue on its own, he says. Instead, proven formats become material the Collective takes to brand clients, offering to build similar content that either lives on the brand’s own channels or is co-created and amplified through the newsroom’s audiences.

That structure turns the newsroom’s own output into a demonstration reel for the agency’s client pitches.

The Agency Stays Separate From the Newsroom, Except When a Brand Wants In

Ramin is direct that The Caliber Collective operates independently of the editorial staff. The exception is when a brand wants to use The News Movement itself as a distribution channel. 

Movember, the men’s health charity, wanted to reach young men on mental health topics, Ramin says, “and increasingly see young men go towards the manosphere.” Caliber built “Confessions Box,” a series in which a host and a vetted YouTube creator work through anonymously submitted relationship issues; the company is producing a second season.

A separate deal with online marketplace platform TaskRabbit involves finding creators whose audiences overlap with the brand’s target market to build out its social content. In a third case, a large accounting firm’s typically dry annual AI report became a social media campaign after Caliber’s team noted that the professionals who buy audit, tax, and consulting services increasingly encounter information on social media as often as on a corporate website.

“Professionals are human beings like all of us, and they get their information from social media,” Ramin says of that insight.

Not every creator partnership has held up, Ramin notes, describing cases where a creator seemed editorially aligned on paper but produced work below Caliber’s standard once a project began, and would not adjust. “If we’re going to put creators on our channels, on our platforms, we need them to meet a certain level and a certain standard,” he says.

SaySo Runs on the Same Lesson, in Reverse

Ramin says an early version of The News Movement’s creator work tried to impose the outlet’s own brand guidelines on partner creators, an approach he now considers a mistake: forcing a creator into someone else’s format undercuts the reason that creator had an audience in the first place.

SaySo, the app Caliber built to let creators publish and monetize their own work, is designed around the opposite instinct. Ramin traces its origin to a specific frustration: “Social media is increasingly being overtaken with AI slop. And even I, who has been working in news and journalism for 15 years, don’t know what actually is accurate.”

He describes three goals behind the app: letting creators earn money they were not previously making on social platforms, giving audiences a space without the platforms’ noise, and reducing the pull to keep scrolling. “You get your digest, and you get on with the rest of your day,” he says.

A New Partnership Ties Reader Trust to Advertiser Confidence

Caliber recently signed a partnership with Goodable, an AI company that scores content for emotional tone before it publishes, across The News Movement, The Recount and SaySo. Ramin frames the appeal in editorial terms, noting that Goodable’s product was shaped by Muhammad Lila, a former CNN war correspondent rather than a pure technology team.

“I feel much safer partnering with an organization that’s built a product from the principles of journalism,” he says.

The Audience Comes First, and So Does Keeping Brands Happy

Ramin says the audience comes first when he considers who Caliber’s real customer is. “Honestly, we’re nothing if we don’t have an audience,” he says.

He follows immediately with the qualifier that gives the business its actual shape: “I’d be lying if I didn’t say there’s part of our business that’s completely separate that also thinks about how we can keep the brands we work with happy.”

In the near future, Ramin wants to extend that logic further into SaySo, building out Caliber’s back office, including finance, HR, marketing and sales functions, as infrastructure creators can plug into as their businesses grow, with Caliber taking a stake in return.

His broader hope for the wider Creator Economy over the next five years centers on direct monetization tools such as Substack, Patreon and beehiiv, and on platforms doing more to separate human-made content from AI-generated content, a distinction he says readers currently have almost no way to make on their own.

“Platforms cannot continue to get rich off the back of other people’s blood, sweat and tears,” he says.

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