Straight Arrow News

What you're reading

Straight Arrow News (SAN) is a video-first US news operation launched in 2022 by Joe Ricketts, the founder of TD Ameritrade and former owner of DNAinfo and Gothamist (which he abruptly shut down in 2017 after staff unionized). Headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska with additional production capacity in Washington, DC, SAN positions itself as 'unbiased' news in a media environment where audiences increasingly distrust legacy outlets.

The operation publishes short-form news videos optimized for YouTube, the SAN site at san.com, and OTT distribution, plus a daily email newsletter and the Off the Record podcast. SAN's signature format includes 'In Context,' which presents the same story from multiple political perspectives side-by-side, plus 'Reality Check' fact-checking segments. Audience runs in the low millions of monthly YouTube viewers, with smaller audiences for the newsletter and site. Staff is roughly several dozen, drawn substantially from legacy-broadcast network alumni.

Ownership & funding

Straight Arrow News (private; Joe Ricketts). Funded primarily through ad-supported.

Ad-supported with a single politically-engaged private owner produces a particular incentive shape — Ricketts is willing to fund the operation through the period when ad-supported digital video doesn't pay for itself, which removes commercial-deadline pressure, but his Republican-donor political background creates owner-influence questions on political coverage that SAN addresses by emphasizing the bipartisan 'In Context' format and by hiring journalists from across the political spectrum. The Joe Ricketts shutdown of DNAinfo/Gothamist after unionization is a piece of background that shapes how observers interpret the operation's structural choices.

Where they land on the spectrum

nwsly's editorial team places Straight Arrow News at Center with a factuality rating of High.

nwsly places Straight Arrow News at Center because the publication's signature 'In Context' format genuinely presents multiple political perspectives on contested stories rather than picking one side, the reporter roster is politically heterogeneous (including former Fox News and former CNN journalists), and the editorial style avoids the framing tells (loaded verbs, characterizations) of clearly-aligned outlets. The operation is explicitly positioned as a centrist response to perceived bias in both legacy and partisan media, and the product's design choices reflect that positioning consistently.

Where any lean shows up: the owner's Republican donor background and the operation's marketing language ('unbiased' as a brand promise) sometimes lead observers to suspect a hidden right-of-center tilt, and the topic selection occasionally reflects priors common to center-right business audiences. But story-by-story the 'In Context' format makes the framing visible to readers in a way that reduces hidden-bias risk. The High factuality rating reflects careful sourcing in reported segments, the fact-checking infrastructure built into the format, transparent corrections and the editing standards of the legacy-broadcast alumni running the editorial operation.

Editorial vs news side

Straight Arrow News' format is built around the news/opinion question rather than around the traditional split — 'In Context' segments explicitly present multiple political-perspective takes side-by-side, reported news segments are framed as straight reporting, and there is no separate editorial board or opinion section in the legacy-newspaper sense. The operation's editorial posture is explicit nonpartisanship with structural choices to back it up. For the bias rating, the rating reflects this integrated format rather than separating news and opinion.

Why we include them in nwsly

Video-first news outlet emphasizing 'unbiased' coverage, launched 2022.

Straight Arrow News gives nwsly a Center video-first slot with an explicit multi-perspective format that no other source in the lineup runs. The format itself — same story, multiple political-perspective takes — is a useful complement to single-perspective coverage from other outlets, and the operation's reach on YouTube means it covers stories from inside the platform where a large slice of US news consumption now happens. It fills both a format gap (video-first) and a posture gap (explicit multi-perspective).

Recent nwsly briefs citing Straight Arrow News

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