This week Atlantic Media launched The Atlantic Wire, including The Atlantic 50, described on the Media Decoder blog as “an attempt to distill the clutter down to the thinkers and talkers who matter”.
The site went live this week, and serves as an up-to-the-minute resource that people can slice and dice by opinion maker or by a range of hot social debate topics, like climate change and healthcare reform. The Atlantic Wire “What is it?” page describes the Atlantic 50 bloggers, columnists, and pundits as their “all-star team”, pared down from an initial list of 400 people, using the criteria of Influence, Reach, and Web Engagement.
PostRank’s involvement is in Web Engagement. We provided 12 months of engagement metrics — comments, bookmarks, tweets, tags, votes, etc. — to give Atlantic Media an in-depth picture of which voices were being heard and amplified. When mixed with old fashioned surveying and interviews around Washington, trends emerged on which bloggers were up and coming voices, which ones were consistently well-engaged with their audiences, and which had waning influence.
The goal of the Atlantic 50 is to provide up-to-the-minute commentary on the relevant issues of the day, from the economy to the environment to the raging health care debate. The list centralizes leading thinkers and writers on these topics, enabling audiences to get a well-rounded view of issues to accompany their news consumption. As many of the Atlantic 50 are bloggers, readers can also weigh in with their own comments on posts.
There is certainly plenty of controversy about who is on the list and who is not, as well as who is above whom, but ultimately readers will be the judge.
Lyn Headley, a PhD candidate at UCSD, shared one positive comment:
Well I for one am impressed. What interests me is the attempt you’ve made to achieve a new kind of “objectivity” in online journalism. You’ve made a sustained effort to combine strong editorial judgment with more automated forms of authority measurement. The result is a unique perspective on the national discourse. Of course your “in house methodology” is probably idiosyncratic but I don’t see that as a negative. Nobody expects a perfect mirror of anything, and some kind of bias is inevitable. I’d like to see more experiments like this combining different measures of authority and editorial judgment.
This dovetails well with the general evolution of journalism, which is getting much less one-to-many and more many-to-many, though it can be strongly argued that well-informed, critically thinking, authoritative voices are still an important part of the dissemination of news and opinion. PostRank is excited to help with this project, and we look forward to how it evolves to help people “read what matters” to them.