About Us - ReNews

who we are

News media emerged in conjunction with the advertising and subscription revenue models in the 1600s. The citizen experience of news and the ad and subscription models’ influence on news integrity have changed little in over 400 years.

The emergence of personalized and targeted digital media in the 20th century exposed critical flaws in this model:

News coverage cannot be funded by the vested interests which it covers
Access to quality news cannot be limited by a citizen’s wealth or income
News must be easily distinguishable from entertainment and other forms of content.

ReNews.us proposes to create a completely new citizen experience of the news, supported by a disruptive and sustainable business model.

ReNews Context Services is incubating this new experience by applying analytics, human-centered design, and machine learning to explore a portfolio of disruptive hypotheses for how the news can better support American democracy. These hypotheses challenge long-held conventions including:

The news cycle
The advertising revenue model
Subscriptions
The role of news in support of local communities and merchants
The lifespan of news content
Access to news by underserved and unserved communities
The role of citizens in news gathering
The definition of journalism
The role of data in news coverage
Bias in news gathering and publishing
The definition of a news organization

Our Executive Board

Bennet Harvey Digital Strategy, Product, Marketing, and Operations

Bennet Harvey is founder and Chairman of Reconstitution, Inc., the disruption incubator which created ReNews Context Services. Bennet has led customer experience design and operations from startups to Fortune 100 corporations. He has repeatedly navigated to opportunities to define first-ever digital experiences in news media, consumer online services, social media, banking, brokerage, insurance, mortgage and real estate. Before launching ReConstitution, Bennet played influential roles on the early teams of Accenture Interactive and Wipro Digital. His career in community journalism and publishing includes roles at the Chicago Sun-Times, El Cerrito Journal, Dinuba Sentinel and Livermore Independent. In the early 90s Bennet was a partner with Walter Cronkite in the TerraQuest venture to engage Citizens with news through gamification.

To be announced Educational Products, Media Marketing

Our third board member has asked us to delay her announcement until other news about her is released shortly.

Tristan de Frondeville Digital Climate Solutions, Education Consultant

Tristan de Frondeville is the founder & CEO of SkyCentrics. SkyCentrics provides Internet of Things (IOT) solutions to commercial building owners, operators, and occupants using WIFI devices and sensors (hardware) and Cloud analytics to generate Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) data for commissioning, fault detection, controls, and Demand Response. Tristan has over 20 years of experience in Product Management, Software Development, Information Management, Internet Sales and Distribution, and Manufacturing. Successful in managing teams, developing company strategy, and implementing sales and distribution to achieve optimal results. A seasoned professional with the proven ability to lead teams, mentor staff, and drive market innovation through improving customer relationships, and building a culture of success. Tristan received his MS in Mathematics and BA in Mathematics from Tufts University.

Our Editorial Board

TBD Career Journalist

ReNews Context Services is seeking traditional journalists, data journalists, documentarians, and societal analysts to govern and operate the ReNews Context Engine Citizen experience of the news.

W.A. "Chip" Cronkite Video Documentarian

Chip Cronkite is an actor and producer, known for The Legends Behind the Comic Books (2007), Cronkite Remembers (1997) and Mercenary Fighters (1988).

TBD Career Data Journalist

ReNews Context Services is seeking traditional journalists, data journalists, documentarians, and societal analysts to govern and operate the ReNews Context Engine Citizen experience of the news.

Our Team

Bennet Harvey Founder and Managing Editor
ReNews Context Services

Bennet Harvey is Founder, Chairman, and Managing Editor of ReNews Context Services, a spinoff from the Reconstitution disruption incubator. Following a first career in community and metro daily newspapers, Bennet has led product and customer experience design and operations from startups to Fortune 100 corporations. He has repeatedly navigated to opportunities to define first-ever digital experiences in news media, consumer online services, social media, banking, brokerage, insurance, mortgage and real estate. Before launching the Reconstitution disruption incubator Bennet played influential roles on the early teams of global digital consultancies Accenture Interactive and Wipro Digital. Bennet’s career in community journalism and publishing included roles at the Chicago Sun-Times, El Cerrito Journal, Dinuba Sentinel and Livermore Independent. After leaving newspapers, Bennet's first project was as a partner with Walter Cronkite in the TerraQuest venture to engage citizens with news through gamification. Bennet received his MBA Finance, International Business from University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and a BA English Literature from University of California, Berkeley.

John Beahm Nonprofit Operations
ReNews Context Services

John is an Advancement and Business Development professional with over 30 years of experience in marketing, communications, sales, non-profit management, and fundraising through organizations that leveraged his strength in relationship management to achieve increased awareness, affinity, and revenue. John’s recent experience includes: Director of Development & Marketing for the Knowles Johnson Institute of Graduate Studies; Sr. Director of Corporate & Foundation Relations and later Interim Managing Director of Advancement for Cambridge College; and Executive Director of The Jenzabar Foundation, a corporate philanthropy. John served on the Board of the North Shore (MA) Technology Council (NSTC) and as an organizational Vice President, and he currently serves as Interim Board Chair for the Millennium Campus Network (MCN), an organization that provides leadership training to college students working on service projects in support of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. John received his MA in Drama from San Francisco State University and BA in English Literature from University of California, Berkeley.

Randy Leonard Data Journalist, News Analytics
ReNews Context Services

Seasoned reporter with top-tier experience, a nose for news and the skills to craft solid stories. Published in The New York Times, WSJ.com, McClatchy, NationalGeographic.com and TheAtlantic.com. Data reporting and visualization, data wrangling and story discovery, simple to complex data visualization, interactive experience design, rapid prototyping, responsive development. Product development, disinformation research and reporting, visual design, data analysis, ML strategizing. Adjunct Lecturer - Data Visualization, Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism, where Randy teaches courses on data reporting and visualization from ideation, data collection and wrangling, and visualization techniques. Students gain practical hands-on experience and become familiar with the range of tools, concepts and resources including training in Python, R Studio, and D3. Randy has an MS in Journalism from Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism and a BS in Geology, Physics, Education from Wheaton College.

Maria Kieslich News Navigator - Industry & Economics

Maria has more than 15 years of senior management experience in start-ups and small companies, with an additional six years working for large financial institutions, including team member positions in marketing, product management, product management, development and strategy. Maria is an occasional speaker and blogger on women's career issues and economics, and has held positions on corporate boards and town committees.Maria is an expert writer on Economics and Real Estate, ghostwriting a regular 1000-word blog on the state of the economy, and the residential and commercial real estate markets for a large national insurance company. Maria also has created and delivered a two-hour course for Lexington Community Education, called “Tackling Time Management for Teens.” She has an MBA in Finance, International Business from University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a BA in Economics, Political Science from the University of Vermont.

Lucy Gray News Navigator - Education

Lucy is the Co-Founder of Actionable Innovations Global, a collaborative professional learning community for innovative educators and merged it with the network formerly known as the Global Education Conference Network. She creates opportunities for those interested in global education and innovation to connect and learn. Connected to this is a group consultancy called the Actionable Innovations Group.Lucy showcases her work as an educator, consultant, and community builder, through her firm, Lucy Gray Consulting, including clients: About.com, Chicago Public Schools, CUE Inc., Encyclopedia Britannica, Edmodo, EdSurge, EF Education, Google, Kajeet, Remind, the University of Chicago, and Cisco's GETideas.org. Lucy has a Masters of Education, Technology in Education from National Louis University and a BA in Art History, Elementary Education, with a Rockefeller Foundation/ACM Urban Education Fellowship, from Beloit College.

Kamal Ali AI-ML Advisor, ReNews Media, Inc.

Kamal Ali has led engineering teams at Yahoo and Peerlyst, been tech lead at several companies, developed production systems at Apple, Yahoo and TiVo. He consulted for 6 years at Yahoo, TiVo, Intuit, GetJar, Catalist, and Elder Research. Kamal’s technology background includes Natural Language Processing: Apple, Vividence, Keynote and Peerlyst; NER, Inference, Disambiguation; Python, Software development: Spark, NumPy; Big Data Modeling – IBM, Yahoo, Intuit, Keynote Systems; Data Analytics: Yahoo, Grokker, TiVo; Applied Research – Stanford, Yahoo, IBM, TiVo, UC Irvine.

Our Advisors

David Rowley Technology Advisor, ReNews Media, Inc.

David Rowley leads agile engineering and product organizations and takes great pride in helping individuals and businesses become better at what they do. He has experience with digital publishing and monetization, online community platforms, ad servers, mobile video platforms, e-commerce systems, event-driven infrastructure, credit origination systems, and scientific applications and instruments. He started his career writing code and became increasingly responsible for multiple disciplines, including business, engineering, product management, UX, SaaS operations, and customer experience. David is currently Operating Partner at Diversis Capital.

Anthony Moor Editorial Advisor, ReNews Media, Inc.

Anthony Moor combines a background in content strategy, editorial operations and product management. Specializing in publishers who create reputable, high quality content across SEO, brand and social to drive lead gen and affiliate marketing revenue. Anthony’s journalism career included roles as Director of Editorial Operations for Yahoo! News, Editor of OrlandoSentinel.com, Editor of DallasNews.com, reporter for KRON-TV in San Francisco, and boardmember o the Online News Association (ONA).

Paul Scanlan Enterprise Crowdfunding, Media Production

Paul Scanlan is Cofounder and CEO of Legion M, the world's first fan-owned entertainment company. Legion M is uniting fans together to invest in and/or produce a diverse slate of original projects in various stages of development, including the critically acclaimed Colossal, starring Anne Hathaway and Jason Sudeikis, the cult hit Mandy starring Nicolas Cage and directed by Panos Cosmatos, Bad Samaritan starring David Tennant, a new feature film and comic book Girl With No Name in development, Paul plays an active board or advisory role in some innovative tech and media companies, including his role as founding board director of New York Rock Exchange, global board member for Haufe, and as a founding board director for Threatminder. Paul is also an adjunct lecturer at Kellogg School of Management (SF Campus) where he is currently teaching a class on entrepreneurship. Prior to founding Legion M, Scanlan was Cofounder and President of MobiTV, Inc., a pioneer and leader in streaming media. In 2005, the Academy of Television Arts awarded Paul and the MobiTV team with the TV industry's highest honor, an Emmy Award for Technical Achievement in Advancing Television.

Ilona Kaplunov Design Advisor, ReNews Media, Inc.

Ilona Kaplunov is Principal and Creative Director of BlueApple Design, an integrated team of graphic, UX and UI designers based in Menlo Park, CA serving clients since 2004. They partner with clients to design meaningful and relevant brand, web, and mobile experiences that drive their success. Ilona and her team designed the ReConstitution and ReNews brand logos.

Phat Chiem Editorial and Messaging Advisor, ReNews Media, Inc.

Phat Chiem is a digital media entrepreneur with more than 15 years of experience in journalism, content strategy, writing and editing.

He is co-founder of StoryCraft, an interactive agency to help startups and early-stage companies figure out their digital footprint.

Phat’s journalism career includes roles as Deputy Editor at Yahoo! News, CityGuide editor at AOL, and Reporter at Tribune Media.

Our Partners

BusinessCompass, LLC AWS Back End Technology Development

We offer innovative products in finance, media, web and mobile. We offer Cloud and Robotics Services. Customers value us as a trusted partner in their cloud adoption journey. We specialize in Cloud, Media, Corporate Distress & Default, Web and Mobile. In Media, we offer managed services for live streaming and video on demand. We are a trusted partner in cloud journey for our clients. We are AWS Advanced Consulting Partner. Our team comprises of AWS certified Solution Architects, Security Specialists, Big Data Socialists, Machine Learning Specialists and DevOps Engineers. We assist clients with cloud assessment, cloud migration, cost optimization, security assessment, infrastructure set up, network set up, disaster recovery and high availability set up. We have set up Big Data, Machine Learning and IoT solutions. We have migrated servers, applications and databases. We have set up remote working environments. We have built, migrated and performance tested websites. We work on diverse industry including utility, financial, media and technology companies and small & medium businesses. We set up live streaming, video on demand and ad insertion capabilities. We have set up live sports broadcasting, virtual film festivals, TV programming and enabling many businesses from Fitness programs and Yoga Studios to take their programs live with membership payment. We have enabled places of worship to live stream services.

PureLogics Front End React and WordPress Development

PureLogics is a full service technology company. With over 16 years of experience, Fortune 1000 customers and over 800+ successful projects, PureLogics develops world-class web and mobile applications for customers across the globe. Our Global Delivery Network allows us to deliver reliable technology and outsourcing services. We pride ourselves in the diversity of the expertise that we offer and our impeccable record with satisfied clients so far. Much of this success is owed to some of the most rigorous and effective methodology that we at PureLogics employ in our engineering process to ensure the best of results. Who we work with: We are lucky to find really great clients. When we do, it is a symbiotic, mutually respectful and intentional two-way relationship, that creates great stuff. Some of the incredible companies are Intel, Samsung US and Pearson.

Explorium Anonymity Data Services

Data might be in our title, but we’re creators at heart. And as creators, we want to build solutions that make a real impact. But whenever we start, we quickly find ourselves limited by our data. We spend our efforts tackling data limitations – access, quality, integration – instead of focusing on making our original vision a reality. We’ve lost sight of the most important thing – the value of creation.

Amazon Web Services Hosting and Network Infrastructure

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster. WS has significantly more services, and more features within those services, than any other cloud provider–from infrastructure technologies like compute, storage, and databases–to emerging technologies, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, data lakes and analytics, and Internet of Things. This makes it faster, easier, and more cost effective to move your existing applications to the cloud and build nearly anything you can imagine. AWS also has the deepest functionality within those services. For example, AWS offers the widest variety of databases that are purpose-built for different types of applications so you can choose the right tool for the job to get the best cost and performance.

Greg Tobias GT Business Advisory - Bookeeping

ReNews.us 'under construction' Privacy Policy

CITIZEN DATA

There is a huge opportunity for businesses to create a new generation of anonymized data services for the Citizen’s benefit.
Personal data can be divided into two types and their related purposes:
- Personalized Targeting Data which ReNews will never store, and which ReNews believes Citizens only need to share with:
  - friends and family,
  - government agencies, or
  - financial and delivery services.
- Anonymized Contextual Data which Citizens should be able to control and share only with sites you trust to provide valuable contextual services based on specific transparent uses of your profile data, and
  - who have no right to share or sell your anonymized data,
  - whose access to your data ends when you choose to end their services.
The two types of data never need to be mixed, unnecessarily putting your full identity at risk.
Every US Citizen may have a single ReNews Anonymized Private Profile which is used to personalize their news and civic engagement feeds across their devices.
You own all of your personal data.
Your personal information is sacred and valuable.
ReNews Context Services (ReNews) and our Reconstitution partners will never store any personally identifiable information about Citizen-members on any company systems.

ANONYMOUS INTIMACY SERVICES

Reconstitution manages Anonymous Intimacy Services used by ReNews and other Reconstitution affiliates.
Visitors to Reconstitution.com for the purpose of accessing Anonymous Intimacy Services are completely segregated from the database of visitors to Reconstituion.com.
Users of Anonymous Intimacy Services briefly enter personal information in a form on Reconstitution.com which passes a random unique identifier from ReNews to third party data providers, along with personal information entered on the Reconstitution.com form by ReNews users wishing to download their profile information from public data sources.
Reconstitution immediately deletes all user information from Reconstitution’s systems upon transmitting the form to our third party data provider partner.
Reconstitution has no database within which to store any personally-identifiable information shared as part of our affiliates’ Anonymous Intimacy Services.
The third party data providers, including Explorium, Inc., use the information Citizens share to create a profile of the Citizen’s publicly available information and send the information back to ReNews:
- with the random identifier, and
- with zero information which can personally identify the user.
Our third party data provider partners then immediately delete the user’s record and the random unique identifier from their systems.
The overall Anonymous Intimacy system makes it impossible for ReNews, Reconstitution.com, or our third party data provider partners to connect personally-identifiable information with a ReNews Citizen-member’s Anonymous Intimacy profile.

SURVEYS, ANALYTICS AND EXPERIMENTS

ReNews will conduct analytics on the full Private and Public Profile databases and report on those results.
ReNews may also offer Citizen-members to participate in surveys and statistical experiments related to policies and patterns of influence.
These surveys, analytics, and experiments will in no way expose any Citizen’s identity, as no personally identifiable information will ever exist on ReNews servers.

CONTROL OF YOUR DATA

You control who has access to which portions of your data and for what purposes.
You determine how economic value can be derived from your data, and who receives payment for services provided using your Anonymous Intimacy Profile.
You decide which services are valuable and the amount of that value.
You decide when and where your data can be used to present you with offers, and from whom.
ReNews will not display ads or offers adjacent to any information or entertainment content, news or otherwise.
Citizens who opt-in will receive offers for products and services in a separate anonymized commerce experience, completely separate from your news and content experiences.
ReNews and its Reconstitution partners will require Citizen-members to opt-in to any services we or our third party partners offer.
Due to our anonymized privacy-protection services, ReNews and its Reconstitution partners can only communicate with Citizen-members through our apps and websites, which must be opened to allow communication.
All services provided by Reconstitution partners will require third parties to pay ReNews Citizen-members for access to the Citizen’s Anonymous Intimacy Profile information.

PUBLIC NEWSMAKER PROFILES

ReNews reserves the right to publish Public Profiles of any individual, company, industry, government agency, party, cause, donor, or politician whose identity appears in news media, public government databases, or other sources of public information.
The existence of a Public Newsmaker Profile reporting on their identity does not prevent a Citizen from also creating a Private Anonymous Intimacy Profile

DONATIONS

As part of transparency requirements as a provisional member of the Institute for Non-Profit News, ReNews Context Services will publish the identity of any donor of individual or collective donations over $5,000 in a calendar year.

ReNews’ Editorial Independence Policy

We subscribe to standards of editorial independence adopted by the Institute for Nonprofit News:

Our organization retains full authority over editorial content to protect the best journalistic and business interests of our organization. We maintain a firewall between news coverage decisions and sources of all revenue. Acceptance of financial support does not constitute implied or actual endorsement of donors or their products, services or opinions.

We accept gifts, grants and sponsorships from individuals and organizations for the general support of our activities, but our news judgments are made independently and not on the basis of donor support.

Our organization may consider donations to support the coverage of particular topics, but our organization maintains editorial control of the coverage. We will cede no right of review or influence of editorial content, nor of unauthorized distribution of editorial content.

Our organization will make public all donors who give a total of $5,000 or more per year. We will accept anonymous donations for general support only if it is clear that sufficient safeguards have been put into place that the expenditure of that donation is made independently by our organization and in compliance with INN’s Membership Standards.

Donate to Support ReNews Context Journalism

How Nonprofit Donating Works

ReNews Context Services was approved for non-profit status by the IRS on January 18, 2024 with an effective date of July 12, 2022. The ReNews Context Services FEIN is 88-3438853.

We are currently setting up systems to accept direct donations. Until that time the IRS allows Citizens to donate to us through our sponsor 501C3 charity, Community Ventures, and receive the full tax deduction. ReNews pays Community Ventures a fee of 4% to cover administrative costs.

By donating in this way you will be supporting two valuable social impact ventures!

Why Support ReNews Context Services?

In an era when publisher consolidation, misinformation, polarization, and privacy violation have redefined the flow of information that we receive as “news,” Citizens need the data and tools to more completely understand how the news impacts them today and into the future.

Your support of ReNews will help launch and sustain a transformative Citizen experience of American news journalism.

How Your Donation Will Create Impact

Your donation to ReNews will:

Make quality news freely available to all Citizens regardless of wealth, income, education, geography or any other variable.
Analyze news journalism across publishers, extract and identify patterns of influence, and present original journalism revealing the complexity of issues relevant to each Citizen-reader’s individual context.
Curate, analyze, and widely distribute publicly available data defining every news topic, issue and policy’s relevance to each American Citizen.
Build a community of engaged Citizen-readers, journalists and academics committed to restoring journalism’s role in shining transparency into the function of our democracy.
Use content and data analytics to surface and report on societal inequities and commission independent journalism to investigate the human impacts those issues.
Publish original data journalism covering the lifecycle of policy development to reveal sources of influence and inequity manipulating policies on the way to becoming legislation, executive, or judicial action which will impact a Citizen.
Help build a sustainable business model reinforcing the role of news in American democracy.

Renews Context Services, Inc. is incorporated in California as a not-for-profit organization and is currently partnered with Community Ventures as our non-profit fiscal sponsor, to receive donations and pass the funds on to us until our application for 501c3 tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service is complete.

Our Donor Policy

ReNews is committed to providing everyone with access to high quality, deeply researched, data-based journalism regardless of their ability to pay. We do not accept advertisements, and we have no paywalls or subscription fees. We depend exclusively on the support of individuals, foundations and organizations who share our commitment to reporting on and confronting inequality.

We are committed to transparency in every aspect of funding our organization.

To maintain the integrity of our journalism, there is a strict firewall between funders and the newsroom. Our news judgments are made independently – not based on or influenced by donors or any revenue source. We do not give supporters the rights to assign, review or edit content. We do not take commissions or assignments from any funder. Accepting financial support does not mean we endorse donors or their products, services, or opinions.

We accept gifts, grants and sponsorships from individuals, organizations, and foundations to help with our general operations, coverage of specific topics and special projects. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that operates as a public trust, we will not pay certain taxes. We may receive funds from standard government programs offered to nonprofits or similar businesses.

As a news nonprofit, we avoid accepting charitable donations from anonymous sources, government entities, political parties, elected officials or candidates seeking public office. We will not accept donations from sources who, deemed by our board of directors, present a conflict of interest with our work or compromise our independence. We will make public all revenue sources and donors who give $5,000 or more per year, and we will list them on this page as well as in our 990s.

ReNews Context Services Donors

Reconstitution, Inc. – $500
Bennet Harvey – $75,452
John Beahm – $50

ReNews Context Service 501C3 will accept donations from high-income and high-wealth Citizen-members to subsidize equal access to news for all.
As part of transparency requirements as a provisional member of the Institute for Non-Profit News, ReNews Context Services will publish the identity of any donor of individual or collective donations over $5,000 in a calendar year.

A Reconstitution Company