Halloran pitch: news API

The pitch: a real-time news-reliability API that scores the news itself rather than the topic. Two signals. First, journalist-byline track record — for a given byline, how fast does their reporting arrive relative to the wire services, and how often is it right, giving a speed-to-accuracy score per journalist. Second, headline–body fidelity — how faithfully a headline represents what the body of the article actually claims, which is where a lot of "news" quietly becomes interpretation.

The customers I pitched were trading systems, LLM news products, and research firms — anyone whose pipeline ingests news faster than a human can vet it and currently treats every source as equally trustworthy.

The Halloran IDEA Pitch Competition at Colby named it a finalist in April 2026.

What I'd do differently: lead with a live demo. A byline's track record computed over real historical coverage against wire timestamps is a one-screen argument, and the scoring idea is far more convincing when you watch it rank a journalist you recognize than when it is described. The market sizing should follow the demo, not precede it.