News Platform Seeks to Add “Value Above the Social Layer”

<strong>Allan Hoving, Special to the Pulitzer Center</strong><br>
<i>Allan is the creator of The Frequency. Views expressed in this guest post are not those of the Pulitzer Center.</i><br>
This month, <a href="https://www.thefrequency.tv">Pulitzer Center content is featured on The Frequency</a>. Launched at the end of March, the site was created as my current Master's Project in interactive communications at Quinnipiac University. But I have been working on making it a reality for more than a dozen years.<br>
<a href="https://pulitzercenter.typepad.com/.a/6a00d834520a2e69e201347fd96e35970c-pi&quot; style="display: inline;"><img alt="Frequency" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d834520a2e69e201347fd96e35970c image-full" src="http://pulitzercenter.typepad.com/.a/6a00d834520a2e69e201347fd96e35970c-800wi&quot; style="width: 439px; height: 225px;" title="Frequency" /></a><br>
I began my career in journalism as an editorial assistant at Rolling Stone Magazine in 1981, and later worked at New York Magazine. By 1997, I was custom publishing director for a division of Thomson/Reuters that produced technology magazines. Since it was also the dawn of the Internet era, I began thinking about how to translate print content into digital and online form. And I wondered what kind of online offering a 40-year-old guy like me might find engaging and compelling. That was the inspiration for The Frequency.<br>
I envisioned it as a fully interactive web show in which users would contribute content (the term user-generated content, or UGC, was unknown at that time, at least to me) on a single hot topic of the week. Over the course of the week, expert moderators and community voting would filter the content so that the very best material could then be professionally produced into a multimedia presentation – a show that could then be broadcast over cable TV. Some of the audience would participate – while many more might just watch the proceedings unfold over the course of a week. I based the name on the Dan Rather "What's the frequency, Kenneth?" incident that became an R.E.M. hit song.<br>
I debuted my concept and an early mockup at a Silicon Alley tradeshow, and some guys who had come out of the MIT Media Lab discovered me there. They recognized The Frequency as a model for interactive communications and said it would cost $4 million to build the "show engine" that would enable the submission and organization of contributed content. But the Internet bubble burst and it never happened; content plays were dead.<br>
I continued to periodically update the mockups but I could neither build out the full site nor raise sufficient funding. When I entered the Quinnipiac ICM program in 2006, I had The Frequency in the back of my mind as my possible Master's Project. I advanced its thesis about bringing structure and consensus – what I now call "adding value above the social layer" - in coursework assignments and papers (all documented on my <a href="https://ahoving.pbworks.com&quot; target="_blank">QU ICM wiki</a>).<br>
Could The Frequency be more easily articulated today than five or ten years earlier? The answer was clearly "Yes," but more importantly, I discovered that it is far easier to show the concept today (rather than explain it). In the dozen years since the original conception, the show engines had been invented in the form of Twitter, YouTube and other popular social media platforms whose open APIs are easily integrated into interactive mashups. I have incorporated these into the version of The Frequency you see today.<br>
It's very gratifying to be able to feature the work of the Pulitzer Center on The Frequency and to help further its mission of in-depth engagement with global affairs through quality journalism across all media platforms. I welcome your comments and suggestions on how to improve and leverage this platform.