Politix Blog

Politix Senior Editor Mary Noble, known to users as PolitixMary, is featured over at The Daily Muse in their recent roundup, How I Became an Editor: 5 Professionals Share Their Path.

Mary took “kind of a strange route” to get her editorial gig. She’s always been a political junkie, but she got a PhD in English, and from there she went on to work as a visiting English professor living in New Jersey.

When she moved to California, she planned to look for academic positions, but an editorial opening at political news site Politix caught her eye. “Writing about politics for an interactive product was a dream—and a dream I’d been repressing because I was training to become an English professor,” she explains. But now that she got the gig, she’s never looking back.

Congratulations, Mary!  Read Mary’s full Daily Muse profile, and learn a bit more about life at Politix.

We’re thrilled to let you know about a few new features just launched on Politix.

Vote Up an Article: Like an article? Vote it up! Just like you can vote up a user’s comment on an article, you can now vote up an article itself to indicate that you like the story, you’re interested in that topic, you liked the headline – really any reason you like. To give it a try, look for the “Vote Up” link above the poll or question box.

Debate Maps: A beloved site feature! Our engineers have been working into the wee hours of the morning to enhance your experience around the debates. Now when you view a debate, you’ll be able to vote and access the debate results all on one page.

New Debate Results: The demographic survey Politix users fill out on registration helps us give us great insight into the trends behind voting on Politix. Now you can see these trends in a more dynamic way. Just hover over the US map and go state by state to see the pie chart “donut” change in real time to reflect the votes. Animated histograms and pie charts let you see how the voters break down by age, party, and gender. We hope these will provide interesting insights into voting trends on a range of issues debated on Politix.

New Debate Maps

Test out the new changes and let us know what you think – we love your feedback!

On Politix we talk a lot about political issues that matter to you, but what makes Politix unique is when you share your opinions. We like hearing your opinions so much that we want to make sure more people hear what you have to say. To that end, we are excited to announce our newest partnership with PopVox, an organization dedicated to bridging the gap between input the public wants to provide and the information our elected officials need to hear. PopVox is now making it possible for you to share your opinions with your political representatives. When you read an article about pending legislation on Politix, you’ll see our new PopVox widget at the bottom of the article. When you click on the widget it takes you right to PopVox, where you can learn more about the bill and directly contact your elected representatives to let them know your stance on the issue. It’s a tool the Politix team is proud to bring to our users to make it easier than ever to have your voices heard and ensure that your votes count. We believe more voices in the political process is always a good thing.

Today’s Politix blog post comes from Schuyler Hudak, Director of Business Development for Politix and Topix.

Today we celebrate the one year anniversary of Politix. And what a year it’s been.

Politix launched in early 2012 as your hub to keep up with political news, interact with others, and make your opinions known about issues that are important to you. People caught on fast and jumped right in, and by the time the 2012 election season rolled around things had really kicked into high gear with record traffic, signups, and site interactions.

And we haven’t had a break since. As Anthony Ha noted in his recent TechCrunch article, “Community Site Topix Sees 40 Percent Year-Over-Year Traffic Growth As Political Focus Pays Off“, traffic on Politix and Topix is still growing rapidly since the election season ended in November:

Topix, a site for locally focused online discussion that first launched in 2004, has seen significant traffic growth in the past year. According to CEO Chris Tolles, that’s because of the big bet that the site made on political coverage and discussion.

Traffic grew 40 percent between December 2011 and December 2012, the company says, and there were 12.4 million unique visitors in January. Those visitors are spending an average of 11.5 minutes on the site each month, and a lot of that activity is coming from smartphones — in fact, the company says that more than half of its traffic is mobile.

Back in 2011, Tolles was already telling me that political content was driving the site’s traffic growth, and that he was trying to find the right product and content strategy to take advantage of that interest. That ultimately resulted in the launch of politics-focused sub-site Politix, where users can share political articles, fill out polls, and comment on the news without being (in Tolles’ words) “that guy on Facebook” who’s always annoying his friends with political commentary.

So what have we been up to here at Politix HQ since launch? Take a look at some highlights:

New Apps

We built a full suite of mobile apps so you can keep your political news in your pocket. Have you downloaded them yet? Check out the Politix apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android.

New People

David Mark came on board from Politico as Politix Editor-in-chief in July 2012. Besides overseeing our crack staff of writers, he represents Politix by providing his political expertise in interviews and appearances on dozens of radio, TV, and news shows and sites including The Sean Hannity Show, CBS News, NBC Bay Area, and The Daily Beast. He’s also working to build a growing stable of expert guest contributors, offering insightful Op-Ed posts to supplement our daily flurry of in-house Politix articles.

New Features

At launch, Politix offered users a way to participate via Debate Maps and article commentary. You wanted more, and over the last year we’ve been busy building additional interactive features, including quizzes, mini polls, and forums.

And you’ve sure been busy using ‘em! Let’s look at some numbers:

• 3869 articles written
• 270,140 comments made
• 209,935 debate map and mini poll votes cast
• 39,124 quizzes taken
• 4,328 late night cans of Red Bull consumed by the Politix team (Our tireless Senior Editor Mary Noble may be responsible for 89.7% of those cans… )

But we’re not done yet. We’ve got plenty of tricks up our sleeves planned for year two, and we can’t wait to show you what’s next.

Happy Birthday, Politix. Our baby’s growing up!

We’re excited to be unveiling a few new features! Especially for our regular commenters, these new changes make it faster for you to find the content you’re looking for and easier for you to have your political discussions and debates.

Introducing the Politix Forum: A new homebase for your political discussions and debates.

In the Politix Forum, you can carry on discussions about every article, debate, and quiz long after they’ve rolled off of our front page. Here you’ll see the comments on an article or debate presented in chronological order (first to last), instead of the nested replies you’ve been seeing. This is a bird’s eye view of the discussion – now you won’t need to click back and forth to read each comment and its replies. The Forum is currently in Beta – test it out and let us know what you think! We’ll be adding forum access to our iPhone and Android apps and our mobile site soon.

Search

Use the search bar at the top of the page to find the articles, debates, and quizzes you’re looking for:

Comment History

Like what someone has to say? Now you can see any user’s complete comment history by viewing the new Comments tab on his or her profile page. Get a feel for another user’s point of view, see how active your friends are on Politix, or navigate back to your own brilliant comments.

We hope you like the new changes – please let us know if you have any feedback for us, we love hearing from you. Now get in there and start posting!

The election results are in – and here at Politix, we enjoyed seeing record traffic, record signups, and record site interactions around the Nov. 6th elections! We had great coverage on election news – here are some of the highlights:

The Presidential Election

Users from all sides have been weighing in on our post-election debate map: Are you happy that President Obama has been re-elected? So far, 52% of voters say they are not happy, 45% are happy with the results, and 3% have mixed feelings. If you haven’t voted yet, weigh in now!

Election Results: State, Local, and National

From gay marriage laws to recreational marijuana laws to new State & Local Officials, November 6th was a night of firsts. How closely did you follow the results? Take our quiz and see what you know – and what you don’t know – about the election results.

Take the Election Results Quiz

You can also vote in our Gay Marriage debate map and our Recreational Marijuana debate map, and weigh in on how you would vote in if these laws were on the table in your state. Check out our Election 2012 stream to see more coverage from the elections & their aftermath.

Politix Election Contest

Leading up to the big day, we ran an election contest, and Politix user fsmakati correctly predicted the outcome for all 50 states in the presidential race! They won a $100 Amazon gift card – kudos to fsmakati for your Nate Silver-like prediction abilities!

Having gained expertise in all things Local through Topix, we’ve been hard at work building the place for you to vote & weigh in on your local elections. We’re excited to bring you our Politix Election 2012: Citizen Sound Off! You can check it out by clicking here.

Now, you can vote and check out user sentiment on Senate races, Governors races, and can check out your Local Ballot to vote on your local Elected Officials.

This is what democracy is all about! Vote, comment, and let your voice be heard.

Vote Now on Your Local Election Ballot

Last night our Editor-in-Chief, David Mark, joined CBS News’ Up To The Minute to discuss the impact of Hurricane Sandy on the final days of campaign 2012. You can catch the video here.

Noah Davis from Street Fight recently covered our new Elected Officials Map feature, and interviewed our CEO, Chris Tolles, for the scoop on our plans for local races. for a preview of some Local Races features that will be coming out later this week. Chris gives a sneak peak of what the new features will entail:

Two years ago on Topix we put up the local races, and asked what people thought about their local Congressional race or their local assembly race. We have a whole new framework now. We built a local core group of people who are interested in the national issues, and now we are building out all the local races and the interactive functionality around the local races. We can leverage the Topix audience to that. That is going to come out soon. With all the focus on the national election, a lot of people are just now starting to follow the local races.

Read up on Noah’s full interview with Chris on Street Fight.

Our goal here at Politix is to provide you with a unique, interactive experience around politics, where you don’t just passively read the news, but engage with it. Today, we’re rolling out a new look with new features, each aimed at giving you more ways to interact with and react to the news.

Politix has a new look
We’ve given Politix a fresh design on the desktop to showcase our stream of interactive news stories, debate maps, and quizzes.

Quizzes
Our Quizzes are a fun way to test your knowledge of various political subjects & issues, then share them with your friends on Facebook & Twitter to see how you stack up next to them.

Mini-Polls
Beyond weighing in on an engaging question at the end of each article, we’ve added Mini-Polls to allow for a different way to give us your take. Now, our stories will either end with a question to kick-start discussion, or a mini-poll that you can vote in to have your say.

Interactive Elected Officials Map
Check our our Elected Officials Map, where you can explore a map of the United States to see the elected officials at the State and District levels. We currently have individual pages for Governors, Senators, and Congressmen. Customize your Zip Code in your profile to automatically see a view of your elected officials.

Check out the new features and let us know what you think here. We hope you enjoy the new features!