Social media remains a dominant source of news for consumers in many countries, outpacing newspapers in 2018 in the U.S., where 45 percent of people get news from Facebook. News providers need any edge they can get to compete in a time of declining profitability and fake news. Nordot is a Tokyo-based joint venture launched in April 2015 with backing from two of Japan's biggest news companies, Kyodo News Digital and Yahoo Japan. Major outlets can source news at no cost; smaller publishers can reach a far larger audience; both sides earn ad revenue. In a demonstration at Kyodo News in Tokyo, Nakase showed me how a local newspaper in Kyushu, in southern Japan, could search for popular topics in Japanese media such as articles about movies, sports, and pets, then add stories to its website with a few clicks. With its new English-language site, Nordot is now focused on growing English-language publishers and increasing its presence outside Japan. "It's inefficient for publishers to try to do everything themselves. Meanwhile, they have to try to compete with massive, powerful news distributors like Google and Yahoo. That's why it's best for publishers to cooperate. We've developed our model to further that cooperation." Read more