This news curator uses AI to select and analyze the stories most relevant to you

Newsletters rule the inbox, but Jono Matusky is developing a way to streamline news consumption.

Matusky is the founder of Newsprint, a platform that uses generative artificial intelligence to monitor and analyze news. Before starting the company as a side project in 2023, the Graduate Hospital resident spent five years working for a communications and PR agency Gregory FCA. A common challenge faced by people in the comms industry is a constant influx of new information, he said.

His solution: Newsprint offers an AI assistant tool to help prioritize and analyze news. While Matusky’s current target clients are communications professionals, he thinks it could be useful for anyone who consumes news.

Matusky previously founded Plynth, an augmented reality platform, which he developed as a side project while working full time at Gregory FCA. Plynth is still running with some users, but Matusky said it didn’t have enough returning customers to be sustainable, so he is no longer focused on it.

Instead, Matusky shifted to a project focused on an industry he was familiar with. After developing the new tool for a few months, he left his former role and started working on Newsprint full time in July 2023.

Matusky developed the tool himself. Newsprint uses AI and machine learning frameworks, including OpenAI’s GPT API, he said, and the tech stack includes Python, Flask, Nextjs, React and JavaScript.

Newsprint is unique from other media monitoring tools such as Google Alerts because it is better at filtering words or phrases, according to the founder. Users can tell the tool what information they are interested in — and what info they aren’t interested in — to teach the AI tool to give better recommendations. It also uses AI to summarize stories and highlight important information from articles.

“It’s kind of those two halves of using this next generation of tools to do much smarter filtering,” Matusky said. “And then also, better analysis, extraction and summarization so that essentially, every day, you can get in your email inbox, ‘Here’s a summary of the stories that matter most to you, why they matter, grouping stories around certain topics’ — and it’s the one newsletter that you need to read today.”

Newsprint launched its alpha product in the fall to a small group of users. Since then, the company has continued to update its product and bring on new users.

Right now, Matusky is the only full-time employee, but he’s aiming to bring on another full-time person soon. The company had a pre-seed round over the summer, raising $400,000 from angel investors and family and friends. Most of that funding supports Matusky and his outside contractors’ salaries and operating costs. He fundraised before pursuing the company full time to give himself some runway, he said.

The company’s business model is B2B subscriptions with companies or communications agencies. In the future Matusky would like to consider a free tier for individuals, especially for journalists who might use Newsprint to aggregate news from their beats.

“I think there’s a lot of room here. Generative AI is something that’s just starting to hit,” Matusky said. “Specifically in the media monitoring space [and] brand monitoring, this is something that I think is very needed and it’s certainly coming.”

Sarah Huffman is a 2022-2024 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.