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SpeakOut now owns a number of sites -- including the recently acquired Policy.com and IntellectualCapital.com -- that try to stimulate political debate of the more high-minded kind. They have the same basic elements: White papers prepared by SpeakOut's staffers on issues ranging from Social Security to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve; utilities like SpeakOut's tax-policy calculator to help you figure out what you'd pay under Gore's proposals as opposed to Bush's; and a feature to help pinpoint the particular candidate whose overall positions most often match your own. The sites also have links to activist organizations, interest-group studies of particular issues, think tanks, and so on. The idea is to give people something to ponder besides the daily cut and thrust of electoral politics. But doing it well takes a level of commitment that isn't visible here. Instead, too much is stale, and too little is updated. YAWNING GAPS. Take, for example, the page at SpeakOut.com dealing with the Patient's Bill of Rights. The central issue in that debate is whether you should be able to sue a health maintenance organization when denial of care worsens your condition. The SpeakOut page doesn't seem to have been updated very much since June. The page on abortion, though it has been updated with news stories about the Federal Drug Administration's recent approval of RU-486, highlights reports from as long ago as 1995. It's all good as far as it goes, but you don't get the sense that there's a really engaged set of minds trying to galvanize the conversation in the site's chat rooms, or to convince non-wonks that it's worth their while to get up, get excited, and get involved. What's more, SpeakOut doesn't have the strong point of view that a political 'zine like this really needs. It can be useful in its own way, doling out statistics and providing links to both pro-life and pro-choice groups, or being fair to both cigarette companies and plaintiffs' lawyers. But there's nothing really yeasty, nothing to provoke a visceral reaction. SpeakOut could learn a thing or two from Salon.com, which is probably as good as anyplace on the Web at dealing with politics and pop culture in a way that inspires and incites reader reaction. Whatever its sins -- and it has many -- Salon is provocative, not boring. It regularly features smart writers proposing new, sometimes incendiary ways to look at, well, just about anything. By contrast, SpeakOut hasn't gathered a set of voices exciting enough to get anyone out of their chairs and into the voting booth, let alone the streets. FAMILIAR DYNAMIC. A lot of SpeakOut's problems have the haunting smell that's redolent, at least, of a lack of capital -- the syndrome that has left many a dot-com to decay. One of the things that many observers found troubling, even strange, about ventures like Salon is that paper-and-ink counterparts devoted to politics and ideas have tended to be modestly successful businesses at best or patron-supported money-losers. Get past the hype, and there has never been anything about the Internet that plausibly promised to change that dynamic. Be really good, really provocative, and get the best writers out there, and maybe you have a chance to be Salon, or The New Yorker, or The New Republic. But even those rare attributes don't guarantee financial success, as Salon's stock demonstrates: It's down to $1.50 a share, and the market cap is just over $20 million. When money isn't flowing freely -- and a casual glance indicates SpeakOut.com is in that category -- the site can't be updated enough to stay on the cutting edge. Nor will the caliber of the ideas on display be strong enough to attract attention. That's what happens in losing political campaigns. And that, sadly, is what appears to be happening here. Mullaney covers e-business for Business Week from New York |
