Tamer Morsy, Engr ’24, is on a mission to save local news. In 2018, he started to learn about the dire status of the news industry, and he wanted to help. In 2020, Morsy’s news app, SpotlightNews, was born with the bold tagline: “For Readers. Not Followers.” Spotlight’s mission is to provide a simple news reading experience without pop-ups or ads. You choose the publications you’d like to read, then the feed offers a wide variety of stories from each. You can also sort by topic. In other words, “you control the order of your news feed.”
Morsy also decided to focus his app on college students. Spotlight now provides access to 350+ college newspapers and commercial publications, with more coming. Subscribers don’t hit a paywall when they’re using the app either. Instead, Spotlight shares 70% of its revenue with the newspapers themselves.
Here, Morsy describes his entrepreneurial journey and what’s next for Spotlight.
What inspired you to launch SpotlightNews?
I noticed fake bots and accounts coming up when I looked for news on Twitter [now X]. Then I started to learn about the local news crisis. So, I recruited a co-founder to build out the tech side and lead iOS development. I also interviewed a lot of journalists. I knew I wouldn’t be happy with myself if I didn’t at least try to work on this problem, given the impact that local news has on democracy.
SpotlightNews is a news app built mostly for college students. A lot of times the only publication left in town is the college paper. And the aging subscriber base is a big problem for news organizations. When I started talking to college students, they said that they liked reading the news, which runs counter to popular belief.
They can go on the app, read their college newspaper digitally, and get access to many other publications. We help college students get access to the news in a different way, where they can control their newsfeed, and it’s not driven by an algorithm. And we share revenue with the newspapers to help them get a younger client base.