Newsy has the same business model as sweat shops. They exploit their employees in order to mass produce video news stories and offer them up for cheap. They pay their employees the bare minimum salary to be exempt them from overtime laws and requires them to work 60+ hours a week, churning out hundreds of generic news videos and offers them to other media outlets at a cost much lower than other content producers. Most employees are overworked, underpaid, burned out and resentful. A producer will typically write or produce 4-6 stories on a normal day. Half of their employees are students from the University. Teams are very small, and there is almost no revision or editing process. Newsy is all about quantity, with little regard for accuracy or quality. Creating compelling content is not the goal. At one point they use to highlight perspectives from various media outlets in their stories, but these days you just get a news story rewritten from a hodgepodge of others reporting, under a hodgepodge of borrow visuals. No value is added from their aggregation/curation. They don't highlight nuances in reporting or compare various media perspectives. Nothing is fact checked. Newsy has been using they same story structure since it's inception. Newsy can only do one kind of story and shoehorns every story through their "multiple sources" template. Newsy is false advertising. You only need to watch a story or two to figure it out. None of Newsy's reporting is original or insightful.
There is little sense of journalistic integrity. At one staff meeting a managing editor told the staff they needed to cut back on the Syrian civil war stories, "...because they happen everyday" and start producing more celebrity relationship stories because, "they click better." Newsy will whip together a story about anything that could even remotely be considered trending. Producers are expected to write and produce video stories in 2-3 hours or they get scolded. Just think about that for a second. Again nothing is fact checked. Non-native english speaking foreign exchange student interns are expected to write stories for an American audience on a regular basis. The culture is toxic. Newsy doesn't celebrate good content, creatively, or innovative ideas, just how quickly they can get stories up and move onto the next.
That being said they're are some talented writers there that produce great content, but those people have been tracked into roles that prevent them from actually producing content on a regular basis. Their political reporters are awesome.
Newsy has been around for over 4 years but has made little traction with consumers. Newsy has amassed 14,000 Twitter followers, 47,000 Facebook fans. For reference the very similar video news organization NowThis News, has been around for under a year and already has over 21,000 followers and just under 107,000 Facebook fans. This really says everything your need to know. Newsy just isn't resonating and can't evolve. They lack the leadership to stay competitive.
Upper management is composed of people who are borderline tech/internet illiterate. I mean lacking a basic understanding of social media, digital media and internet communities in general. The most senior news person working there has a year's worth of experience with CNN and leads the entire news division. Newsy never invests in its employees or its future, but are willing spend more on groceries than they spend on an average employee's salary or lease studio space that it doesn't use. The CEO tries to micromanage every aspect of the operation, despite being completely detached from the day-to-day, and is generally just a distant and unpleasant person to work with. I witnessed them fire some the most storied employees while giving the staff no explanation as to why and not even acknowledging the person was gone. Almost like they were trying to pretend the person never worked there. And a producer who was caught plagiarizing in a majority of her stories was given a slap on the wrist and sent back to work. The CEO bad mouths EVERY single former employee like he has a deep personal vendetta against them for moving on with their lives, even though their hard work built his company. It's just simply the least professional and most toxic organization I have worked for.
Most employees have no idea what the company's mission is anymore. They claim to be a journalistic endeavor, yet will make content for anyone, about anything if they promise to pay (About.com) even if Newsy doesn't have the skill set, expertise, or personnel to do what they pitch. They are also increasingly focused on entertainment because ... journalism?
Newsy is a mess. If you are a professional of any kind, avoid at all cost. If you are in school it's a decent part time job, but don't take a full time job if they offer. You will be better off working just about anywhere else. Newsy pretends to be innovative but they say they are.