Billionaire-backed Straight Arrow News shuts down after five years

Straight Arrow News, the Omaha-based digital news outlet built and funded by billionaire Joe Ricketts, stopped publishing on Friday after five years in operation. Staff were told of the shutdown in a meeting that morning, and Ricketts followed with an open letter posted to the company's site confirming the decision.

"After considerable investment and effort, I have made the difficult decision to cease Straight Arrow's operations," Ricketts wrote, adding that his belief in the outlet's mission "does not by itself make a business sustainable." He said the need for journalism that separates fact from opinion "does not" go away, even as the company itself does.

"After considerable investment and effort, I have made the difficult decision to cease Straight Arrow's operations."

The closure was first reported by TheWrap, which credited The Guardian's Jeremy Barr with breaking the news, and was confirmed in a Yahoo Finance report the same evening. Neither Ricketts' letter nor the news coverage specified how many employees were let go.

A Subscription Bet That Didn't Pay Off

The shutdown lands less than three months after Straight Arrow News tried to put its finances on firmer footing by launching a premium membership. According to the company's own press release from August 12, the outlet began charging $12.95 a month, or $99.90 a year, for ad-free access to its reporting, subscriber-only newsletters on media bias and health coverage, and exclusive episodes of its "Unbiased Updates" podcast.

At the time, executives framed the move as the start of a growth phase rather than a retrenchment. "Our ambitions are big. We want to tell more stories and foster more conversations with you," Derek Mead, the company's senior vice president of content, said in that release, adding that reader surveys showed people "want to be told what they need to know, not what they need to think." Indu Chandrasekhar, SVP of marketing and subscription growth, said at the time that nearly half of surveyed readers indicated they would pay for premium features.

In his shutdown letter, Ricketts said subscribers would be notified separately about refunds, and that Straight Arrow's content would stay online "for a limited time" as the company winds down.

Five Years of Claiming the Middle

Ricketts, who made his fortune founding the discount brokerage TD Ameritrade and later owned a stake in the Chicago Cubs, launched Straight Arrow News in June 2021, pitching it as a corrective to a polarized media landscape by presenting competing political perspectives on the same stories. At its launch, the site operated with a skeleton staff spread across several cities and was run by Conway Cliff, a former programming executive at The First who had also worked at The Blaze, CNN, Bloomberg and CNBC. Ricketts said at the time that he saw "a gap in the market" for unbiased, fact-based news and wanted to prove wrong the media critics and industry skeptics who argued such a thing was simply impossible to sustain. The outlet built its brand partly around third-party credibility audits: in August 2024, it announced a perfect 100-out-of-100 trust score from NewsGuard and a second consecutive "Balanced" rating from AllSides, which it said reflected an audit combining expert editorial review with a blind bias survey of 816 participants.

The company had reported roughly 70 employees as of last year, according to industry trade coverage, running newsroom operations out of Omaha alongside a New York office. Neither Ricketts' letter nor Friday's news coverage gave a current headcount or disclosed the company's finances, leaving the scale of the job losses unclear.

Straight Arrow built its pitch to readers around the idea that mainstream outlets omit stories that cut against their own ideological lean. Its "Media Miss" feature, described on the company's own membership page as a way to get "a complete picture of the news," surfaced stories the outlet said were underreported by either left- or right-leaning coverage, alongside a daily newscast called "Unbiased Updates" and a slogan promising "no manipulation, no bias, no agenda." The site positioned itself as an alternative to opinion-driven cable and digital outlets rather than a wire service, framing neutrality itself as its core product.

Not Ricketts' First Abrupt Closure

This is not the first time Ricketts has shut down a news operation without warning. In November 2017, he abruptly closed DNAinfo and Gothamist, two local news sites he owned, days after their staff voted to unionize — a decision that NPR reported at the time put roughly 115 journalists in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco out of work. Ricketts said then that the sites' ad-supported model was not financially viable; the timing nonetheless drew sharp criticism from labor advocates. There is no indication that unionization played any role in Friday's closure, and no reporting has drawn a direct comparison between the two episodes beyond Ricketts' history as a publisher willing to pull the plug quickly.

Straight Arrow News' collapse adds to a difficult stretch for independent digital newsrooms, several of which have folded in recent years despite wealthy backers or venture funding. For now, those affected are current employees awaiting word on severance, and subscribers who paid into the three-month-old premium tier and are being told to expect refund notices rather than new reporting.

Ricketts has not said whether he intends to redeploy any of Straight Arrow's assets, staff or editorial approach elsewhere, and his letter contained no indication that the outlet, or anything like it, will return.