About
Skewed News Tutor is the creation of Colleen Bradford Krantz, journalist, author and documentary filmmaker. Colleen, who spent a decade reporting for newspapers, used to argue that much of the public’s claims of bias were exaggerated or tied to misunderstanding of the media. While she is convinced that the number of careful journalists outnumbers the careless ones, she also now sees more news sources allowing their reports to include a mixture of news and opinion without labeling the work as commentary. The inclusion of opinion can be as subtle as the choice of loaded words during narration. It’s not always easy to pinpoint. That’s where Skewed News Tutor comes in. The startup, which Colleen began in November 2012, creates videos and mobile apps to help students and others improve their ability to filter information.
Learn more about Colleen at Colleen Bradford Krantz. Contact her by email at Colleen[at]SkewTutor[dot]com
Becky Waller Bausman is Chief Strategy Officer for Skewed News Tutor. A former lifestyle and business magazine writer and editor, Becky brings to Skewed News Tutor a fifteen-year career in marketing and business strategy leadership. As Chief Strategy Officer she leads development of go-to-market and positioning strategy, and contributes to development of product and business planning. In addition, Becky works as an independent marketing and business strategy consultant based in Silicon Valley. In that role, she counsels executive leadership in technology companies of all sizes on how to best bring their innovations to market. She has held previous roles leading product and field marketing strategies for ecommerce software and enterprise B2B professional services firms. Becky lives in the San Francisco Bay Area; she holds a B.A. in journalism from Iowa State University and an MBA in finance and consulting from the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota.
Teacher Ed Moody serves as educational advisor.
The public still trusts the media more than any other source of information – such as businesses and government. Our hope is that our video sets and mobile apps will help viewers/readers to learn to pinpoint exactly why a report might feel slanted. And we hope it gives them the information to calmly explain those specific concerns to a news source. The good ones will listen. We also want them to appreciate high-quality reporting when they see it and become dedicated followers of those particular journalists. Please share this with older children and their social studies teachers or professors so they might better understand how to be discerning news consumers.
Additional information:
Our first skew set (Livestock Housing) was supported, in part, by Humanities Iowa and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The views expressed here are not necessarily theirs, but we thank them anyway. Thanks to TS Media for its great work on our first video skew set.