Like many college students, Porter Bayne, a longtime Republican and native Texan, had been active in campus politics. However, after graduating, he eschewed going into politics, instead starting Web companies in his home state of Texas and working for sites like Travelocity.com. Bayne remained a politics nut but found himself continually frustrated with what he perceived as the mainstream media‘s tendency to boil down speeches and platforms into 30-second sound bites. He wanted to use the Internet to help people recontextualize quotes and statements that had been taken out of context.
Along with several other core staffers, Bayne launched Ameritocracy.com in time for the 2008 election. One of those staffers is community director John Brooks. His job is to make sure that users come to the site and feel engaged. Brooks got his start in the community development world at Beliefnet.com, where he helped expand the production of user-generated content. Brooks talked to mediabistro.com about his goals for making Ameritocracy stand out from other user-driven content aggregator sites and how to keep its momentum going post-election.
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How was Ameritocracy conceived? Describe the process of going from the initial idea to creating a site and hiring a staff.
The site began as the inkling of an idea by Porter [Bayne]. The earliest form of the concept — which [Bayne] described as “adding concise, hopefully-objective context to major campaign soundbites,” was a newsletter he wrote in 2004. The idea was to create a newsletter someone could [read] to get a more nuanced view of a topic than they were getting from the debates and speeches.
After getting some positive responses to the idea of the newsletter, Porter and [now creative director] Iris Chamberlain started thinking about how to build out a system that would let a lot more people cover a lot more campaigns and topics. After the process of figuring out how to raise some money and form a company, they started building the site in May 2008.
There are plenty of political news aggregator sites out there. Why did you want to create one that focused solely on quotes and statements?
The mainstream media these days is lazy. They rely on soundbites; stuff taken out of context. Our goal is to recontextualize what’s been taken out of context. On Ameritocracy, you can take a quote that’s been all over the media and blown out of proportion and recontextualize it to understand the actual truth of the statement.
In The New York Times Magazine, Virginia Heffernan referred to Ameritocracy as nonpartisan, but you count members of the Kennedy family as some of your staffers and supporters. Do you worry about being perceived as a liberal site?
That’s the great thing about the site — the content comes from readers, not from us. We can only put on the homepage what the site’s members have written or commented on or contextualized. So if you come to Ameritocracy and you think it has a liberal bias, the best thing to do is for you to start adding quotes and comments and contexts that you think represent your conservative viewpoints.
We also make a point to emphasize that Porter was always a Republican, was a member of College Republicans, and “reached across the aisle” in 2004 and voted for a Democrat. He still considers himself a Republican with some liberal viewpoints on some issues. But we’ve also reached out to groups from all over the political spectrum, from the RNC to Common Cause, and received enthusiastic responses regardless of political ideology.
| “We’re empowering the commenters, but we’re also forcing them to be responsible, because in order to respond to a post, you need to cite a source. It’s not just a bunch of people crying ‘bullshit.'” |
Of course you’re going to analyze quotes from Barack Obama and John McCain, since they were running for president. But how do you decide which pundits, columnists, and talking heads are worthy of review on your site? Who exactly determines this and what exactly are the criteria?
We try to stay as neutral as possible and let the community decide what matters. But we do try to promote as much activity as possible, and so by updating the homepage with, say, a claim that Obama made in a speech that’s making headlines any given afternoon, we know our users are going to respond.
But we place absolutely no limits on who our users can cite. It just so happens that Obama, McCain, Biden, Palin are on everybody’s minds right now, all the time. But a few weeks ago we featured a quote from Paris Hilton on the homepage. She said, “Nowadays, sound bites, not sound policy, determine our country’s course.” We liked that. And she was making political headlines for that anti-McCain ad. So it seemed perfectly appropriate.
Would you describe Ameritocracy as closer to social networking or citizen journalism? Why?
Not to cop-out and give you a non-answer, but it’s a perfect marriage of both. From the social networking standpoint, it’s sort of a more organized and structured approach to the sorts of relationships that have a habit of organically emerging when people post comments on blogs. Often they get to know each other. And we’re taking that aspect of user involvement — commenting — and making it kind of the focus of the site, rather than a peanut gallery. We’re empowering the commenters, but we’re also forcing them to be responsible, because in order to respond to a post, you need to cite a source. It’s structured; it’s not just a bunch of people crying “bullshit.”
Who does what on Ameritocracy’s staff?
There are six core employees — Iris and Porter founded the site together and still run it out of Seattle. Brian Finney, who is our systems engineer, and James Peterson, our CTO, are also based in Seattle. Bobby Kennedy and I are based in New York. Bobby has been on board from very early on and helped Porter launch the site. He serves as our outreach director. I serve as community director.
We also have an amazing pool of freelancers and interns who do superb work, and our team of advisers includes absolute luminaries like Esther Dyson, Mary McGrath, David R. Johnson, and Mike Dover. We have a great team. We’re very lucky.
Ameritocracy is currently in beta. When do you plan to transition out of beta, and describe how the site will differ in conjunction with this change?
Really, to be honest, there’s no deadline. Right now we’re enjoying new members signing up and giving feedback and telling us what they think about the site. Google is still in beta, if you hadn’t noticed. But speaking of which, we’re working on something new for early 2009 that takes what we’re doing and makes it easier for a lot more people to get to and use, and we’re really excited about it. Current users will be invited to the beta.
With whom is the site most popular, and will you continue drawing that user, while expanding to entice a broader group of users? What’s been the feedback trajectory for the site — did users ‘get’ it at first? Have opinions become increasingly positive or negative, and why do you think that is?
We don’t track a great deal of information about our members, but all signs indicate that we’re pretty evenly split down gender lines and that most of our members are probably in the 18-35 age range, people who were already Web-savvy to start with. Generally speaking, people seem smitten with the idea, but as with any new Web site with a new spin on established ideas, it doesn’t mean they jump at the chance to make it part of their morning routine. We hope they will. We think they should. And that’s sort of what we’re focused on right now: taking that enthusiasm and converting it into a fact of people’s Web life.
How will the site evolve after November’s election? How, specifically, do you intend to make it a destination, even after the campaign and all the dialogue surrounding it ends? What will you do to insulate Ameritocracy from dwindling interest and traffic?
Right now the election is the first thing on everybody’s mind, of course. But after the election people will go back to caring about issues. That’s why the site is organized around issues, not around candidates. If you cared about the environment before the election, you don’t stop caring about the environment after the election. That goes for abortion or gay marriage or any other issue you’re passionate about. People who are passionate about specific issues are people who we think will — and should — keep coming back to Ameritocracy. People who are unhappy with the mainstream media’s portrayal of issues and their shortcuts covering the news are people who will keep coming back to Ameritocracy.
Also, [the site] doesn’t necessarily have to be limited to just politics. If you’re a fan of, say, the Rachael Ray show, and you really want to set up a page on the site to check the authenticity of things said by Rachael Ray and the guests that appear on her show, there’s no real reason you can’t do that. As long as your goal is to parse out information, to hold relevant figures accountable for what they say, that’s what we’re there for. And it shouldn’t bore you. If Rachael Ray is relevant to you, go for it. You could set up a “Transparency in Recipes” issues page. I would love it more people did that.
Five tips for starting — and sustaining — a user-generated site:
1. Let everybody in. The more people on the site, and the more groups you reach out to about joining and creating an online presence, the more diverse the conversation.
2. Be willing to change it up. Ameritocracy started out with a heavy political focus because it launched during the 2008 election season. But they knew they needed a game plan that would keep users engaged after the election was over.
3. Don’t expect immediate success. Ameritocracy is still in beta and doesn’t have a timeline for transitioning out of it. Instead, they’re letting their users’ responses and comments dictate how the site should evolve.
4. It’s okay to be controversial. Paris Hilton may not be a politician, but if you put a quote from her on the homepage of your Web site, people will have strong opinions about it.
5. Let users police each other. Although Ameritocracy does have community moderators, they count on users to provide backup and evidence for any claims they make on the site. And users don’t hesitate to correct or challenge each other if they disagree.
Lilit Marcus is a freelance writer and the editor-in-chief of SaveTheAssistants.com.
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