Pickled Politics

Founder and publisher Terry Lee knows he’s onto something with Influentials Network when within days of stealth launching the political news aggregator and filter and its Facebook fan page, he already had more than 2500 fans solely through word of mouth.

Although there are a number of other news and political aggregators and websites, Influentials Network is the single aggregation source for anyone who want the most important and relevant political news in one, always-updating website. It is a vertical aggregator built for professionals, businesspeople and the political junkies – audiences who need more than just the top stories on a given day.

Influentials Network is a proud proponent of aggrefiltering of news. It’s proprietary algorithm tracks that latest and trending political news stories while its human team of content editors filters that news down to the ten most important at that time. “We just cover a few political issues at a time, but we want to know all about it,” Lee explains. “I’ve described our coverage an inch wide but a mile deep. The site makes a conscientious effort to be nonpartisan, and also works to ensure a sense of inclusiveness by moderating its debate and comments forum. Lee has strong feelings about the importance of this practice: “We adopted an online debate policy, which is nothing insulting, gratuitously mocking, or gloating,” he explains. “That’s something you don’t see in major media, because they are encouraging controversy.”

With only a handful of editorial staffers, Influentials Network relies heavily on its algorithm and tips from its daily Capitol Hill-based readers. Lee serves as publisher and managing editor, and is the only full-time editorial staffer.

The online community’s response to Influentials Network has been “overwhelmingly positive,” according to Lee especially from online political “influentials” who had never had a “go-to” destination for real-time and current political news. The challenge is in making this type of media outlet sustainable, making it “not just a project, but a business,” in Lee’s words.

Although he believes in modest beginnings, Lee has big dreams for Influentials Network. Leveraging its unique set of aggregation algorithmic codes, Influentials Network will be able to “develop local content sites within our existing platform that will allow us to duplicate our formula as many times as we can find appropriate markets.”The first 10 local Influentials Network sites will include :

Atlanta
Baltimore
Boston
Chicago
DC
Detroit
LA
Minnesota
NYC
San Francisco/Oakland

Lee’s plan is to add additional 10 to 20 local and international localities each year for the next 3 to 5 years.

The site plans to make money via traditional online ads plus a value-added “corporate subscriptions” where organizations can have a tailored news-feed IN-like platform created for internal and/or intranet use. Services would also include article writing and distribution.