Linda Iulianella

Blasting News was created in 2013 by Andrea Manfredi, a passionate advocate for truthful, fast-paced journalism. Frustrated with the traditional singularity of a newsroom, Andrea decided to create something different. He contracted a handful of freelance journalists mainly focused on news regarding financial and insurance products and gave them the freedom to embrace their own ideas and opinions. In less than three months, Blasting News had dozens of contributors, and by June 2013, the website had 2 million monthly unique visitors. After observing the rapid growth, and to give more diversity for the contributors (now termed Blasters) to write and therefore drive more readership, Andrea and his team decided to organize Blasting News into different categories, including Politics, Finance, Entertainment, and Sports, among others. Due to the high volume of articles being produced in a short period of time, Reviewers were hired as curators of Blasting News to check every single article prior to publishing. Reviewers were given the power to approve, reject and amend every piece of content to make sure that false, sensationalist and clickbaiting news was filtered out. Proprietary technology was also created to detect errors and ensure that the website was free of plagiarism, offensive content, veracity, and any other issues. In addition to Blasters, and in order to drive more engaged readership to Blasting News, in 2016 social media influencers (now termed Social Blasters) were offered the opportunity to be remunerated for sharing popular content, according to their preferred subjects, to generate more traffic. From that moment on, Blasting News became an all-in-one platform where production and distribution of content work together: where the main goal is to develop systems that promote the dissemination of information. In 2016, Blasting News won the Google DNI awards. In 2020 Blasting News hired Angelo Paura as the editorial director of the platform.