Millennials may be used to having their vacation-, weed-, comedy-, and food-related issues catered to by Viceland, but one area in which they’re still lacking for advice is finance. At least, that’s what former BuzzFeed president Jon Steinberg is banking on as he prepares to launch his own finance news network aimed at the under-40 crowd. The startup is called Cheddar, and will “offer up business and finance videos for a younger audience.”
Steinberg finds finance to be “exciting and interesting and a big part of dinner table discussion,” but considers it an “under-covered” topic despite the never-ending news cycle of today. And the few millennial-targeted outlets that are covering finance aren’t doing so to much effect. So Steinberg has brought on Peter Gorenstein, a former Yahoo! executive, as his chief content officer to draw adolescent viewers away from their Girl Meets World marathons and games of Mystery Date (we’re obviously not millennials) and over to Cheddar’s viral videos about the Pareto principle.
Cheddar (which is probably still being used as young-people slang for “money”) will broadcast live from the New York Stock Exchange, the second floor of the NASDAQ, and another “more casual” location like, say, Williamsburg’s Baby’s All Right. (That’s just our guess as to what a “less buttoned-up setting” for a show about diversifying your funds would be.) And in order to ensure that younger eyes are watching, Cheddar will only put reporters who are younger than 40 on the air, the better to skip the “heavy TV makeup” with. (There’s probably a cool, slang term for the Age Discrimination In Employment Act, right?)
Steinberg has $3 million in startup money, but he’s still shopping around for the right streaming platform for his live news show. He intends to start production in May, when he will start to build up from one hour to a full day’s coverage of financial news.