PolicyMic To Host Pundit Competition

Policymic.com, a website for political commentary and discussion, will sponsor a competition at Harvard this week to find the best campus pundit through a series of online debates—the first of which will take place Monday with a focus on the presence of final clubs on campus.

Site co-founder Chris F. Altchek ’09 said that the winner of the debates will be dubbed the “best pundit” at the College and will have the chance to be featured on the site. A “pundit” is the site’s name for a frequent commenter who has “leveled up” by receiving “mics,” which users award to each other for good comments.

While most of the site is devoted to opinion pieces and users’ comments on them, it also holds “office hours”—live discussions with a professor or politician. Altchek said that a segment of the “best pundit” competition will be an “office hours” installment on Friday with Harvard Economics Professor Jeffrey A. Miron.

There will be similar competitions at the Harvard Law and Business Schools, said Altchek, adding that he hopes to put on similar events at other universities.

Altchek, who left his job at Goldman Sachs to launch the site in March with Stanford graduate Jake Horowitz, said that his academic experiences at Harvard inspired him to create a website where young people can engage in high-quality discussion about range of political issues.

“Our generation doesn’t read online news and comment,” Altchek said. “Facebook is not really a great platform for smart discussions about politics. For us, it’s all about the discussion.”

Altchek said that he missed the lively discussions in the small seminars he took as part of his Social Studies concentration.

“This is an attempt to recreate that,” he said. “I learned just as much from the students around me as professors.”

Altchek said that while his site is meant to emulate the atmosphere of those small seminar discussions, a more traditional news website like the New York Times is analagous to a larger lecture course, where the opinions of individual users are not noticed in a meaningful way.

One of the site’s most important features, Altchek said, is the engagement between readers and authors, citing an instance when former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice responded to a commenter on the site.

Policymic user Allison Gofman ’14 said the site allows her opinions to reach a wide audience and is “more accessible” than blogging sites such as the The Huffington Post.

Gofman added that the site could be “addictive” at times and explained that the game-like reward system gives users a strong incentive to keep commenting.

Matthew K. Clair ’09, who began writing for the site in April, wrote in an email to The Crimson that he thought it had particular appeal for college students.

“It’s a natural extension of the arguments and discussions that [students] are having in their dorm rooms,” Clair said. “PolicyMic provides a necessary platform for this productive sharing.”