Our Story

Orato World Media will be the go-to news source where individuals experiencing world events can share their verified, truthful experiences with a global audience.

Our readers gain a greater understanding of the world events and issues that challenge us. Orato will renew the public’s trust in digital media by delivering true stories from real people.

Orato World Media gives people anywhere in the world, without prejudice or discrimination, a trusted platform in which their true experiences can be shared with a qualified journalist through a rigorous interview and verification process.

Orato provides state-of-the-art journalistic and technical support to its contributors so they can capture, and share verified, factual, eyewitness accounts of world events. By reading first-hand human experiences, Orato readers grow closer to their fellow humans through knowledge, understanding, and truth – thus reducing the cultural and philosophical separations that divide us.

Orato combats fake news and takes ownership of that which is real, verifiable, sound, honest, and legitimate.

Orato’s staff, administrators, board members, volunteers, and contributors share certain values:

• To honor the truth and share eyewitness experiences with an open mind.
• To tell the stories that are not being told fairly and transparently.
• To seek out the truth and challenge the dissemination of false information, exaggeration, manipulation, and distortion.
• To help eliminate the misuse of social media accounts that have skewed reality to the benefit of some and to the loss of many.
• To re-establish trust in media.

In the late ’90s, with the advent of the internet, Sam Yehia, working with a team of globally situated editors, artists, and journalists, launched a digital media platform based on first-person storytelling.

In the ensuing five years, Orato garnered a lot of attention but was unable to find a sustainable revenue model at a time when digital advertising and subscription models had not yet been established.

After selling all his businesses in 2019 and when the world was shuttered by the global pandemic in 2020, based on the deteriorating state of news media worldwide, Yehia decided to relaunch Orato World Media as a non-profit endeavor. As he explained; “Lifting the human voice so we, as fellow humans, can better understand the challenges that others are experiencing is too important to be exploited for profit.” The epiphany of that realization reset the stage for the relevancy and timeliness of Orato’s concept today.

With the growing prominence of AI, misinformation, skewed and obfuscated facts, and so-called “fake news,” many of us have lost trust in media thereby motivating us to search for alternate sources.

With all the competing “truths” circulating, no matter how well respected a media brand has become, conventional journalism struggles to compete and attract the attention of viewers as it once enjoyed in print, radio, and television industries before the advent of the internet.

As the manipulation of facts and information is revealed, it does not change the fact that readers are still hungry for the truth, but where do they find it?

At Orato our readers subscribe to the belief that ensuring verifiable truth in the dissemination of news and information is critical to a thriving, open, and free democracy. That’s why those who seek a true understanding of the human plight embrace the content we feature on Orato.

With the benefit of technology, we are a global community. We saw this with COVID-19, recent wars and conflict zones, and our shared grappling around the world with issues like ethnic cleansing, demographical manipulation, corruption, police brutality and racism, to name a few. Everyone has been touched in some way by the impacts of these events.

There is no better time than now to share trustworthy stories that help us understand what our fellow human beings experience around the world.
Orato will be the de facto site to find captivating, honest, first-person accounts from real people.