Anchoring Himself
Luke Russert ’08 traveled the world to think about his future. Now he’s come home to cable news.
The Fact Finders
In a media and political environment where it can be hard to know what’s true, these two alumni are building information platforms that replace partisanship with hard data and documentation.
print
mail
NEWS
Tim Huelskamp ’05
Cofounder and CEO,
1440 Media
WHO: A lifelong entrepreneur, Huelskamp grew up selling soda from his parents’ driveway in the Chicago suburbs and peddling custom-mix CDs to high school classmates. Majoring in finance at BC with a minor in history, he was fascinated by the biographies of business tycoons, from Rockefeller to Winfrey to Bezos. What he took away from those stories is that “Companies, when at their best, create products that make peoples’ lives better,” he said. In 2017, after a decade in private equity, Huelskamp started his own company, 1440 Media. His goal, he said, was to create a source of unbiased daily news briefings—distilled information, presented without commentary—that readers can grasp in under five minutes.
WHAT: 1440, named for the year the Gutenberg printing press was invented, produces free email newsletters on specific topics, such as health and medicine, as well as a daily roundup of general news. But instead of publishing its own original stories, 1440 curates fact-checked reporting from a wide spectrum of well-established global news organizations to compose concise, neutral summaries with links to supporting sources. Huelskamp said that 1440’s five million subscribers are evenly divided among Democrats, Republicans, and independents. He plans to make 1440 a “curiosity machine” that additionally directs users to articles, videos, and other content that serve as smart explainers on everything from economic principles to natural sciences. Think “Pinterest for knowledge,” he said.
WHY: “I had the same pain point every day,” Huelskamp said. “I’d try to understand what happened yesterday, but everything I read had an opinion in it. It’s frustrating when you are trying to learn about something and social media platforms put out misinformation and conspiracy theories. Ninety-nine percent of the content on the internet is not worth your time. We find the incredible things and put them in one ecosystem.”
GOVERNMENT
Kyle Dell MA’95, PhD’07
Executive Director and CEO,
Vote Smart
WHO: Dell discovered the importance of civic engagement as a kid, when his Michigan hometown closed its public schools after local taxpayers voted against property tax levies that would fund them. “Something you don’t think is political can become political really quickly,” he said he learned. He interned on Capitol Hill while an undergrad at Kalamazoo College, and in the lead-up to the 1996 presidential election—which fell in the time between earning his master’s and starting his doctorate in political science at BC—Dell briefly joined the staff of Vote Smart, a nonpartisan nonprofit that informs voters about candidates, lawmakers, and legislation. In 2022, he stepped away from a career in academia to return to Vote Smart as executive director.
WHAT: Since 1992, Vote Smart has been compiling and sharing exhaustive profiles of federal and state elected officials and candidates, including their voting records, public statements, endorsements, and ratings by special interest groups. “We have the receipts,” Dell said. Now he is busy modernizing how people can access those receipts. Under his leadership, the Vote Smart website, which currently has about 2.5 million registered users, rolled out an AI-powered chatbot that can conversationally answer questions about politicians, their positions, pending legislation, and more. The chatbot’s responses are drawn exclusively from objectively verifiable information in Vote Smart’s database, Dell noted, meaning they avoid any partisan lean.
WHY: “We’re all in the position of being overwhelmed with information, and by the rage bubble that many political figures want us to live in,” Dell said. “Maybe you saw something on social media, but you want context. We want to be the trusted source of information you can find whenever you need it, no matter where you live, no matter what issue is driving you, no matter what groups you may belong to or support.”
MORE STORIES
