[SaaS Series] The Data-Driven Future of Media With David Rothstein

David Rothstein is the CEO and Co-founder of Newsmatics, a next-generation news technology company dedicated to transforming the way organizations collect, analyze, and distribute information. Under his leadership, Newsmatics has grown to 70 employees and launched products like EIN Presswire, which processes 175,000 press releases annually, and Perspectify, a media bias tool. 

David’s career spans from pioneering internet publishing in 1990s Prague to building a network of 3,900 news sites and partnering with universities on innovation hackathons. He is passionate about using technology to promote transparency, combat misinformation, and help people navigate today’s news landscape.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [3:38] How David Rothstein launched a leading global press wire 
• [7:00] Why the business began in Prague — and the story behind the $0.10 beers
• [10:36] The market pivots that shaped Newsmatics’ DaaS evolution
• [15:41] How a disruptive pricing model fueled rapid word-of-mouth growth
• [22:38] Overlooked benefits of press releases most marketers miss
• [24:42] Using Affinity Group Publishing to reach news deserts and AI models
• [34:47] Tools that reveal media bias with a single click

In this episode…

What does it take for a news technology company to survive three decades of disruption and still lead in the age of AI? From the early days of the internet to today’s data-driven landscape, the rules of media have constantly changed. How do you stay relevant while the entire industry reinvents itself?

David Rothstein, a pioneer in digital publishing and news technology, explains that longevity comes from listening obsessively to the market and evolving before you are forced to. He highlights the importance of shifting business models — from advertising to subscriptions to self-serve DaaS press release distribution — based on real customer demand. That adaptability allowed the company to remain independent and consistently profitable. By leveraging a massive news index, his team expanded into affinity publishing and media bias detection tools, pairing distribution with transparency. He also emphasizes building talent from within and partnering with universities through hackathons to fuel continuous innovation.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with David Rothstein, CEO and Co-founder of Newsmatics, to discuss transforming news delivery in an AI-driven world. They explore bootstrapping through the dot-com crash, pioneering self-serve DaaS press release models, and building tools that detect media bias and propaganda. David also shares insights on fostering internal talent and staying profitable while scaling innovation.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• David Rothstein on LinkedIn
• Newsmatics
• EIN Presswire
• Perspectify
• Affinity Group Publishing
• USA Today
• ChatGPT
• Claude
• Slack
• Google Meet
• The AI-Driven Leader: Harnessing AI to Make Faster, Smarter Decisions by Geoff Woods
• Data Science for Executives: Leveraging Machine Intelligence to Drive Business ROI by Nir Kaldero
• Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick
• Sales Pitch: How to Craft a Story to Stand Out and Win by April Dunford

Special mention(s):

• Nexstar
• CBS News
• ABC
• Fox News
• AP News
• CompuServe
• Founder Capital

Related episodes:

• “Automation Solutions with Wade Foster Founder of Zapier” on Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Pipedrive: Brain Surgery, Married, & Moved Company from Estonia to U.S. All at Once – with Urmas Purde [Inspiration]” on Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[SaaS Series] Revolutionizing Online Forms and Productivity With Aytekin Tank of Jotform” on Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable moments:

• “Every day is a new day where we’re exploring a new idea — it’s in our DNA to keep innovating and not stop.”
• “If you’re not issuing content, you’re invisible, and you need to push it out.”
• “We get our clients 90% of where they need to go for 10% the cost.”
• “Every day we ask: what’s changing, what tools exist, and how do we adapt?”
• “We build lasting relationships that create opportunities across every stage of a career.”

Action steps:

1. Stay aware of media bias: Use tools like Perspectify to evaluate political leanings and credibility so you can better understand how news is framed and avoid misinformation.
2. Broaden your information sources: Intentionally consume news from diverse outlets and viewpoints to reduce echo chambers and gain a more balanced perspective.
3. Own your narrative: Take advantage of self-serve distribution platforms to publish announcements, insights, or expertise and build visibility and credibility.
4. Use AI to accelerate learning: Leverage tools like ChatGPT to research trends, deepen industry knowledge, and stay current with rapid technological change.
5. Engage in hands-on innovation: Join hackathons, brainstorming sessions, or collaborative tech projects to experiment with data, spark new ideas, and drive continuous growth.

Episode Transcript

Intro 00:15

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 00:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here. I am the Founder of InspiredInsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have David Rothstein, CEO and Founder of Newsmatics. You can check him out at Newsmatics.com. David, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out, since this is part of the SaaS series. Actually, they consider themselves an AI-powered DaaS company, which he’ll go over more in some past episodes. I had one of the co-founders of Zapier, Wade Foster. That was a really interesting interview with one of the co-founders of Pipedrive. I think Dave and I had them. There were fewer than 10,000 customers. I think there are over 100,000 now. And the founder of Jotform and how that started, I forgot the tens of millions of users. And it was just interesting to hear the journey from scratch. So check out more on InspiredInsider.com. 

This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help B2B businesses give to and connect to their dream 200 relationships and partnerships. We do this in two ways. Number one, we are an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast for ROI. We do the strategy, accountability, and full execution and production number two. We are also an easy button for your company’s corporate gifting. We make gifting and staying top of mind to your clients, partners, and prospects. Simple, seamless, and affordable. Some companies even send gifts to staff, from a culture perspective. 

All you have to do is give us the list of people you want to follow up with and keep in touch with, and we do everything else from there, from gift selection to the card to your branding on the box. Just give us a list of addresses, and we’ll do everything else right. So it’s not like David, we send one gift. It’s a gift every four months for five years to our most important relationships. So for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways on how I can give to my best relationships, and I found no better way over the past 15 years to profile the people and companies I admire in my podcast and send them sweet treats in the mail so you can check out Rise25.com or email [email protected] if you have questions.

I am really excited to introduce David Rothstein. He’s the founder and CEO of Newsmatics. It’s a Washington, DC based news technology company dedicated to transforming how people access, analyze, and understand news. As I was saying before, they’re an AI-powered DaaS company, which David will go over more, transforming global news into that structured, scalable intelligence and really Newsmatics. They’re over 30. I don’t want to age you or the company, David, but over 30 years old at this point, the company has developed industry-leading platforms, and you’ve probably heard of some of them, including the press release distribution service EIN Presswire, which is a global network of niche publications. Perspectify, which is a tool designed to help news consumers identify media bias and credibility. And really, they use advanced data and media technologies to combat misinformation. Right. Because there’s none of that on the internet, right? Increase transparency. Empower organizations. You could also check out another site, Affinity Group Publishing, which we’ll talk about as well. But David, thanks for joining me.

David Rothstein: 03:28

Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 03:31

Yeah. This is going to be fun. I’m going to pull up your site in a second, but just talk about Newsmax and what you do.

David Rothstein: 03:38

Well, we’re a well, we’re a well, it’s true. We this is our we just finished our 30th year, and we go way back to the early days of the internet publishing, putting together some of the first websites around back in the, you know, the mid mid 1990s. And we started. Some of the earlier publications from Century Europe online, where we ended, we started in Prague, though we’re an American company, but now we have 70 people. We have people in the US, in Europe, Asia, and South America, and we’re one of the world’s leading news indexers.

So we’re scanning and indexing thousands of news sites, and we’re sitting on a lot of news data that we have a lot of other meta information to. And over the years, we’ve launched a variety of products around that one. Our flagship EIN Presswire. It’s one of the leading press wire services. Now we the last 12 months, we’ve issued through us about 175,000 press releases. So it’s a global service. We we’re we’re positioned as an easy to use, pay as you go middle market press wire service. Not for publicly traded companies but for typical small and midsize businesses.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 05:11

And yeah, if you’re looking at the if you’re listening to the audio, there’s a video version and we’re on the site here and you can see there’s a personal injury, there’s Shriners Children’s, there’s, you know, a bunch of different type of business hotel reservation software, types of businesses using your, your platform.

David Rothstein: 05:28

Yeah. And we take that content and we’re, and we’re a Google News publisher. We also feed the press releases out onto say, Nexstar sites, CBS, ABC, Fox News affiliate sites, and into AP and and now most recently onto USA Today publications, USA Today‘s rebranded from Gannett to USA Today Co, and so we’re kind of a one stop shop for small for marketing communicators to get a wide distribution for their marketing communications. And these days, a lot of that is getting ingested into the large language models, getting into ChatGPT, getting into Claude, and so forth. So we’re a gateway content provider for ingesting. So we’re perfectly lined up now for, you know, the AI era with all this content 100%.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 06:31

I want to go back and we’ll we’ll explore more on EIN Presswire. Here we are. And you can see all the different distribution points. And it makes perfect sense. It’s like, okay, send this out. We’ll distribute to all these platforms. And it’s great for discoverability from an SEO. And also now from an AI perspective as well. Talk about the original idea. What was the original idea behind AI and EIN Presswire, Newsmatics in the company when it first started?

David Rothstein: 07:00

Well, when the when we first started, we were in Prague in 1995. And my wife and I were interested in doing something other than just working in typical offices after college. So, so we, we, we, we did a number of things, but finally we ended up reading an article in The New York Times about how young Americans were finding their way to Eastern Europe, specifically. Prague is a beautiful city. And it was so we we we read an article about how we could you could buy beer for $0.10, get a meal for a dollar, and get a beautiful hillside apartment with a terrace for $250. So we’re like, okay, so we sold our car, rented our condo, and packed up two dogs and three boxes, and we went to Prague. Really, with absolutely no idea of what we were going to do there. And, but it was an interesting melting pot of lots of ideas and opportunities. And we ended up meeting some people who had a data company, and that led to putting some data related to the Czech Republic onto CompuServe. 

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 08:18

And so then. I had a CS.Com email. My first email was yeah, okay.

David Rothstein: 08:23

And so that then led to, you know, then early browsers were showing up in Mosaic. And so that led to building a few web pages, and we realized that you could actually put this content onto a web page, and anybody could see it all over the world. So we took that idea and started a site called Central Europe Online. So we just started aggregating. We actually had a newsroom in Prague and had journalists and other writers. It’s sort of a traditional newspaper online, but it’s hard to run a newspaper and make any money doing it. So we started, and things were evolving. So we ended up moving into streamed audio and video.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 09:12

I mean, this is really early on, really. I mean, I mean, when you say stream audio, that seems normal, but like, yeah, I mean, to do that was, I mean.

David Rothstein: 09:22

It was invented as you go along with people who have never done anything before, like it. And, you know, in a way, it’s the same as what’s happening now. So now what we’re doing is we’re building, we’re building off of AI models that can help us manage large data sets. So along this continuum, it’s sort of been a, you know, an exploration, and at every single stage of retooling, repositioning, and flowing with an ever-changing tech landscape. So, the early days were very different than today, other than the same innovation, the same waking up every day and saying, what’s happening, what tools are available, how do you change it, and so forth are happening right now.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 10:09

Yeah. I mean, for you, especially David and your company, it’s like information overload. I mean, you’re aggregating all this information. So I’d love to talk through the pivot point. So it sounds like okay, initially, we had you had this newsroom. Right. And okay, we need to make money. Then you said you went to streaming audio and video. What were some of the maybe take me? We can go up to the present day. Some of the pivot points were these different services and how they came about.

David Rothstein: 10:36

Yeah. Well, the pivot points are market-driven in the sense that when we started, it was friends and family. Money and credit cards. And then it was advertising-based, and we found that we could actually generate enough money to run the business with advertising. And then the.com bust happened, and there was no more.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 10:59

Where were people advertising, like when you were taking advertising? How did that work?.

David Rothstein: 11:03

It was it was actually easier because it was it was it’s very focused. And we weren’t competing with Google. So essentially, you know, the click model wasn’t there yet. And then Google kind of gobbled up a lot of the revenue from small publishers. And we shifted over to a paid subscription model. So we realized that, well, if advertising can’t do it, and people were coming in and were offering a software as a service, then we would just put a paywall up. So we ended up putting up one of the first paywalls, and we got, you know, that was even a challenge, actually charging people online for transactions. A long time ago, we took for granted. It wasn’t that. It wasn’t that simple.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 11:50

And what were they paying for? Like, what was the deliverable?

David Rothstein: 11:54

Yeah, the deliverable was the news that they couldn’t get anywhere else on the topic. So, and we were we were writing articles. We had a on Central Eastern Europe that wasn’t available in other places. And then we were an early what they call scraper service, you know, now it’s indexing. But we would.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 12:17

It sounds less black hat. Right.

David Rothstein: 12:19

So we, we, we would organize headlines from lots of different services and, and that essentially, you know, Google News kind of came out of all that. And for a period of time, we could charge subscriptions for that. But then, you know, that ended up evolving. But so we ended up finding that we had the news kind of we had a lot of we had a lot of traffic, and the market started asking to commingle their marketing messages into our content. And that sort of led into the EIN Presswire. So the aim presswire kind of found us because it was the market saying, you know, telling us exactly what they wanted. So, we pivoted over to that.

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