Founders

Paul Biggar

At NewsLabs, Paul acts as CEO, driving a vision centered around journalists and their communities.

Prior to starting NewsLabs, Paul completed his PhD in Computer Science at Trinity College Dublin. His PhD was on the topic of compilation of scripting languages, and he had been the maintainer of phc, an open source compiler for PHP, since 2007. His work has been published in international conferences and journals, and Paul has been invited to speak at Google, Facebook, Lawrence Livermore, and StackOverflow DevDays, amongst others.

You can email Paul at paul@newslabs.com.

Nathan Chong

Nathan is NewsLabs' CTO, focussing on building the technology platform for NewsTilt.

Prior to NewsLabs, Nathan was a researcher at ARM where he focused on formal verification and computer architecture. His work can be found in Cortex-M1, Cortex-A9 (the virtualization architectural extensions) and AMBA4 (proofs of deadlock freedom). He has published papers on the ARM architecture and was a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan in 2008.

You can email Nathan at nathan@newslabs.com.

Investors

NewsLabs received funding from Y Combinator, the Mountain-View-based startup incubator. It is advised by Paul Graham, and his influence is apparent in NewsLabs' service.

Journalists

NewsTilt selects professional journalists to form a "collective", which was seeded from a group with over 20 years of experience each. This core group admits new journalists based on the quality of their work. The "seed" journalists are Jon Margolis, Les Kretman and Doug Clawson.

Jon Margolis was chief National Political Correspondent, based in DC, for the Chicago Tribune. He was then a columnist and correspondent-at-large for the paper, with a brief stint as an off-beat sports columnist. He previously served as Newsday's Albany bureau chief. He has written articles in the NY Times Magazine, the New Republic and American Prospect, and is the author of "The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964".

Les Kretman has more than 30 years of journalism and management experience. He is experienced as an executive producer of news magazines, deputy bureau chief of NBC's Washington Bureau, and has spent nearly a decade coordinating NBC's coverage at the White House.

Doug Clawson began a 25-year career in journalism as a sportswriter and columnist at several newspapers, before leading an award-winning sports department at the Lewiston Sun-Journal in Maine. While there, he also co-hosted a weekly TV sports talk show. Doug went on to become the managing editor of Stars and Stripes, the editorially independent newspaper that serves the troops and their families overseas. Doug now lives in Germany where he still loves the newspaper business ... even if it hates itself.

The journalists chosen by the seed group, who will write on the NewsTilt platform, have previously reported for:

• US daily newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Houston Chronicle, Newsday, Boston Globe and San Francisco Chronicle,
• UK daily newspapers such as the Times, Guardian, and the Financial Times,
• News magazines such as Newsweek, New Republic, Monocle, National Geographic and New Scientist,
• News services such as Associated Press and Bloomberg News,
• Broadcast news including NBC, CBS, BBC News, Fox News and NPR.