That’s right – NewsWhip is becoming part of Sprout Social. Together we’ll be focused on delivering the complete social and news intelligence platform for businesses to monitor, understand, and respond to reputational risk, trends, and social narratives as these play out in the public sphere.
We will leapfrog to the next generation of what media and social listening software needs to become: Smart, agent-centric, and enabling the connective tissue of teams, intelligence and actions in one place.
I couldn’t be more excited about this, but first: this is a big moment for us and one where I want to take stock.
The People who Built NewsWhip
NewsWhip is an improbable technology.
It was built by an improbable team. A former New York lawyer who wanted to put a real time filter on the Internet and see what stories and events were popping. A computer engineer who saw how to build it. And a rapid coalescence of incredible talent in the media monitoring world today – encompassing engineering, product, design, sales, storytelling, account management and operations.
Over the past decade, our neutron star of talent and creativity has thrived amidst seismic shifts in the media landscape, from the 2010s Facebook traffic gold rush and the PR race to master social media, to the rise of misinfo and disinfo, countered by our Data for Democracy initiative, and the fragmentation of social media paired with AI’s emergence. Through it all—improbably—we’ve grown, forging partnerships with the world’s leading newsrooms, brands, and tech platforms, while building a critical oasis for understanding how our world is shaped.
It’s been an honor to tackle these challenges with an incredible group of people: the NewsWhip team. We’ve battled disinformation, enabled global reputation monitoring, pushed the boundaries of our industry, and delighted users. We’ve also chomped cigars, jumped off bridges, danced-off, hackathoned, and fought through crises with zeal and camaraderie, always inspiring each other and always active on the frontier of what we can do for our customers.
The other incredible people we work with are our customers – professionals who work at the vanguard of media understanding. They don’t want vanity metrics – they want to know what’s actually happening and influencing people right now. They know that a clear understanding of reality leads to better decisions, calmer minds and greater success. By working closely with the smartest media insights leaders in the world, we’ve developed a deep attunement to what they need – and what we need to build.
On the publisher side we work with editorial, audience and social teams who create and insert critical factual reporting into the social melee where we live today. Ever since the Associated Press invested in NewsWhip in 2016 I’ve been ever more proud to help the people who think critically, report facts, and keep our shared reality together.
I find it incredible that our small team (now 70) has built a technology that has become a defining platform for the world’s critical newsrooms – and is now growing full speed into the Fortune 500 too.
Meeting Sprout
There’s nothing quite like meeting someone who really gets what you do. It’s even better if that someone sees what you could do next – and that vision is beyond what you were even expecting.
Sprout Social is a remarkable company with deep expertise in social media management and listening, earning high praise from our customers. Newsrooms use NewsWhip to uncover stories and rely on Sprout for distribution, while brand teams spot issues on NewsWhip and turn to Sprout to explore or address them. When Sprout reached out, we quickly recognized the potential of our combined strengths – NewsWhip reveals the stories shaping the world, and with Sprout, we can empower organizations to respond confidently and take decisive action on them.
Both NewsWhip and Sprout have been hard at work advancing AI research and product development, convinced that workflows for issue detection, reputation monitoring, and crisis management are ripe for transformation. By uniting our skills and technologies, we intend to lead this change in the social and media space.
Once again – the best piece of all of this is the people. The Sprout team led by Ryan Barretto are an incredible group – marrying thoughtfulness, care and craft about their work with humour, supportiveness and open mindedness in everything they do. Add on speed and ambition, and an inspiring vision of bringing social insight to every part of the business and you’ve got a group I can’t wait to team up with and get to work on supporting our customers and building the future together.
What comes next?
Welcome to “NewsWhip by Sprout Social.” For our users in publishing, agencies, brands and government – we’ll be continuing our clear focus on our underlying data and insights: real time, issue tracking, and quantified throughout. We’ll also be continuing our development of Agents, which will keep getting smarter as the year progresses. Comms, news and PR customers – we’re here to build for you.
Now we’re going to have some serious firepower for our next phase. Sprout has fantastic platform relationships, at a time when news has become social first. It has incredible engineering depth. And it has thoughtfully built workflows that NewsWhip can knit into. With AI, we can build solutions that are smart, agent-centric, and enable the connective tissue of teams, intelligence and action in one place.
Today, the last message I want to deliver is a heartfelt thank you. If you’re reading this as a customer, platform partner, employee (past or present), or one of our many allies or friends in the social, PR or news industry – you’ve helped make us who we are today.
Customers, we’ll be communicating directly with you via email, and feel free to reach out to your CSM – or to me – if you have any questions.
With that we are going to polish up our tools and get cracking on the next stage in our work. Watch this space.
For media enquiries please email PR@sproutsocial.com
