The CIA venture capital fund In-Q-Tel has announced it is funding the entire Series A round for co-working startup WePlot for corporate journalists.
The start up was conceived by a former deputy director of the CIA and an MIT professor of business ergonomics who has been on the CIA payroll for decades.
“We wanted to take the genius of the community ethos of WeWork and apply it to news agencies and the intelligence community to form one group that fuses all the ways both are making the world a better place. And so WePlot was born,” said Professor Won Long Wang who also serves on the boards of Zoom and TikTok.
WePlot got right to work buying up office space in New York and Washington D.C. The New York Times and Washington Post have announced they are moving their entire foreign correspondent staff, foreign policy staff and politics departments to the new co-working spaces, along with the Atlantic, the Economist and Foreign Policy magazines. ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC all praised the idea for its efficiency in coordinating their daily narratives and will all have teams in WePlot offices.
In New York WePlot will be located across the street from the United Nations, while in the capitol they will be next door to the Canon House Office building on the hill where it will be easier to meet with Speaker Pelosi’s team on coordinating stories and narratives on race, white supremacy and domestic terrorism. Washington Post Assistant Editor Malik Ahmed said this would streamline coordination processes with CIA officers.
“Sometimes they get stuck in traffic coming to our offices from Langley and we are late for editorial meetings. This just makes things easier if we all show up at the same place. No more scheduling conflicts or issues with technological or cognitive symmetry.”
From Good Citizen, here.