For the busy professional, keeping up on daily news can be tough—unless they work in the news industry. The typical 8-hour workday, commute time, and daily necessities like eating easily take up ten to twelve hours per day, Monday through Friday. Add on six to eight hours of sleep per night, and the typical full-time worker gets on average six hours to themselves each day. Pets, children, social lives, and exercise easily chip away at those hours even more.
Given the choice, how would you spend your few hours? Most people choose to watch television, check e-mail, or surf social media and the web. Reading lengthy news articles, while it will keep you informed, isn’t the most popular choice at the end of a long day.
Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg were working as news producers at NBC when they noticed their friends outside the industry were having a hard time keeping up with news. They quit their jobs and started theSkimm, a daily newsletter that highlights and condenses the most important news of the day.
Carly Zakin & Danielle Weisberg, co-founders.
Photographer: Sophie Elgort
“We saw that our friends—primarily our girlfriends—would come to us and say they were too busy to find out what happened in the world today,” said Zakin in an interview with Mashable. “We really served as information concierge for them.”
And their idea has quickly gained popularity, with $1.1 million in seed funding raised in a little over a year. Zakin and Weisberg hope to build up theSkimm’s team more with the additional funding, expanding the site and how it affects people.
“TheSkimm isn’t just about reading an email, it’s about living a Skimm life,” a recent blog post stated. “Our goal is to redefine information consumption to fit into a streamlined modern routine and turn the news experience into an actual lifestyle brand.”
