Meet Instagram’s favorite ‘news concierge’

By Brian Braiker

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In 2019, veteran journalist Mosheh Oinounou was the executive producer on “CBS Evening News,” a rarefied and powerful job in broadcasting earned after years of working at CBS and other networks, including Fox News and Bloomberg TV. In 2020, the Emmy-winner went out on his own, but not to another network or streamer. He didn’t even go to Substack or Medium like other name brand journalists have done in recent years. Instead, he sort of accidentally pivoted to Instagram where he stumbled into a new prototype of news service.

“I took to instagram not endeavoring to start a news brand, but trying to correct the record on things and calm people down a little bit,” he says. “If I was putting a business plan together two years ago, I probably wouldn’t have started on instagram. At the time I had a private account with 500 people.”

Oinounou says one galvanizing moment came early in the pandemic when unsubstantiated rumors — that New York was going to shut down all bridges and tunnels, that there was going to be Marshall law — were flying around even among his more reasonable friends. He called his contacts at the New York Police Department, sources at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and refuted the rumors on Instagram, which he made public.

“I’m not going to scare the hell out of you for the sake of ratings. I’m just here like anybody else to figure out what the hell is going on and what we can believe and why people are saying certain things,” he says on this week’s episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast.” “If you want to get a straightforward take and you want to get a take that sometimes questions your assumptions, that questions your politics, come my way. And I found that there was an audience for that and it grew over time.”

Today, two years on, he has amassed north of a quarter million followers on his Mo News account where he acts as a “news concierge.” That’s a fancy expression for someone who summarizes the day’s most important news, curating a series of article screenshots in his Stories from the likes of The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and other top outlets, breaking down the complexities of international relations, domestic politics, climate change and the occasional human interest story. He also engages in dialog with his readers, interviews experts and generally strives to make the news transparent, fair and conversational.

“One of the reasons I took to Instagram as opposed to Twitter was because I found Twitter, as many will attest, to be a nasty place,” he says. “Things get taken out of context. The vast majority of folks who link to stories, they don’t even read the stories and they’re, like, ‘I have opinions’.”

Which is not to say Oinounou doesn’t have opinions. He’s just open about them. Which is one of the many ways he’s taking his hard TV news background onto a platform that feels more suited for a younger, engaged audience. He points out that the average age of the audience for network news is in the mid 60s. For cable news it’s even older, at 70, “meaning half the audience is even older than that,” he says.

On Instagram he can spread out, do deeper dives, entertain obsessions, interact directly with his audience and not have to butt heads with network suits.

A relatively new Brooklynite, Oinounou moved to his apartment near Borough Hall with his wife Alex earlier this year. On the podcast, we talk about his upbringing (he grew up wanting to be a weatherman) and we get into the state of broadcast news, the rise of Fox News, where he used to work, as a de facto communications wing of the GOP. We talk about what’s next for him as he expands into podcasting and newsletters, and … we swap stories about Paul Rudd.

Check out this episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast” for more. Subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts.