The 20% Doctrine by Ryan Tate

The 20% Doctrine by Ryan Tate

Author:Ryan Tate
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins


5

The Huffington Post Brings 20 Percent to the Masses

Off the Bus Changed How We Elect Our Leaders and Organize Ourselves

Until now, we’ve looked at employee side projects. In this chapter, we examine something different: a project that harnessed the spare time of people far beyond the host company, of thousands of volunteer contributors across the country. It was 20 percent time on a massive scale. Participants included students, teachers, actors, and computer technicians.

The project, Huffington Post’s Off the Bus, was the first instance in which the idea of citizen journalism, in which amateurs report stories for free and bring the concerns of ordinary people into the news, was made to really work. By the end of the 2008 election, Off the Bus had changed media and politics forever.

“Before Off the Bus, no one believed that professional-amateur [journalism] hybrids could work,” said Clay Shirky, the New York University lecturer and Internet culture expert. “Afterward, everyone did.” As the New York Times wrote in the heat of the 2008 presidential campaign, “Off the Bus is now probably the biggest . . . of all the new political, non-candidate sites to spring up during the [race].”

Much of the credit goes to Amanda Michel, who commanded Off the Bus’s daily operations. Her real-world experience organizing Internet volunteers for two presidential candidates helped her realize the vision of countless starry-eyed citizen journalism utopians who had come before. “Amanda’s work on Off the Bus helped transform journalism in two big ways,” said Shirky. “First, she showed that citizen journalism was not just possible but practical and, second, she showed that amateurs produce different kinds of value than the pros.”

In chapter 4, we saw how Joan Sullivan’s high standards created an academic oasis for children in the South Bronx. In this chapter, we’ll see how Michel and her team convinced thousands of adults to voluntarily hew to standards no less ambitious in order to change how Americans follow politics. Twenty percent projects live and die on their ability to recruit people, and Off the Bus did that extraordinarily well. It also showcased how to work effectively with outside contributors.

Unlike HuffPo’s many opinion bloggers, Off the Bus’s 12,000 volunteer journalists were carefully groomed and organized into teams capable of highly coordinated journalism—real nose-to-the-grindstone reporting that produced major national news. Its “citizen journalists” broke the monster “Bittergate” story, in which Barack Obama said at a fund-raiser that “bitter” small-town residents “cling to guns or religion.” Off the Bus obtained an incendiary quote from Bill Clinton calling a Vanity Fair writer a “sleazy . . . scumbag” for writing about his wife. It broke the news that Democratic voters had begun to care far more about health care and education than the Iraq war. It used an army of distributed citizen journalists to build comprehensive databases of donor influence, party policy evolution, campaign tactics, and campaign offices. It was first to report how Christian activists were paid to write op-eds in favor of Republican candidates; it unearthed a preelection anxiety



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