About Newsela
Newsela was founded in 2013 by Matthew Gross and Dan Cogan-Drew, based on the observation that classrooms typically contain students reading at very different levels, sometimes spanning several grade levels of reading ability within a single classroom, but that most reading content, particularly engaging, current news and nonfiction content, is written at a single fixed reading level, making it difficult for teachers to give struggling readers access to the same interesting, relevant subject matter as their more advanced peers, since simplifying content to an appropriate reading level for each individual student would traditionally require enormous manual rewriting effort that most teachers don't have time to do themselves.
Newsela's core product takes current news articles and other nonfiction content and republishes them at multiple different reading levels, letting a teacher assign the same underlying article and topic to an entire class while each individual student reads a version calibrated to their own specific reading level, an approach designed to let struggling readers engage with the same current, relevant, and engaging subject matter as their classmates rather than being relegated to separate, often less interesting age-appropriate-but-not-engaging reading materials. The company has built partnerships with numerous news organizations and other content publishers to source the original articles it then adapts across reading levels, and has expanded beyond news articles into broader nonfiction and informational text content across various subject areas relevant to school curricula. Newsela has positioned its platform as supporting both literacy instruction broadly and content-area learning in subjects like science and social studies, where teachers want students engaging with current, real-world content rather than only textbook material, while still accommodating the wide range of reading levels present in most real classrooms. The company's customers are primarily K-12 schools and school districts. Newsela has raised substantial venture funding from investors including Owl Ventures, Reach Capital, and Emerson Collective, reaching a valuation exceeding $1 billion, competing with other differentiated literacy instruction tools in the K-12 education technology market.
