TheConservatives.com Status Update

John Solomon is not just a writer for The Washington Times—he is also a founder of the new Times-sponsored website, TheConservatives.com. Solomon discussed this new website at a recent Heritage Foundation Bloggers’ Briefing.

TheConservatives.com is an innovative new site with amazing new technologies. At this website, people can keep up with profiled conservatives, such as Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, in a way that they couldn’t before: the site aggregates everything that such profiled conservatives are up to. This means that if you want to check out what Mitt Romney is up to, you can check him out on TheConservatives.com and see his latest YouTubes next to his most recent tweets and Facebook updates. At the same time, the website collects and analyzes the opinions of conservatives who contribute to the site—everyday, regular, unprofiled conservatives, who have thoughts and ideas to share. At once, TheConservatives.com works from the top-down but also from the bottom-up. It is, in its way, a media revolution.

Solomon called TheConservatives.com “an outgrowth of a discussion” he had in Miami in 2008, where “everyone was talking that there were these two spheres: there was the social publishing world, the blogosphere, and at that point, there was that sort of uncertain world that we were calling the social networking world. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube were just starting to become the phenomena that they are today,” Solomon explained. “And we sat around the table and said, we want to make something that’s going to marry the two worlds.” And thus TheConservatives.com was born.

Solomon explained that when he began the process of creating TheConservatives.com, he had some lofty goals. He originally wanted to combine the “best aspects of social networking, the best aspects of the social publishing world, push it together, and then create a new world, a new medium.” He spoke about how he had tried to make TheConservatives.com a resource that ordinary “Joe the Plumbers and Jane the Tellers” could have their voices heard—while still receiving information from the top. “We wanted to reverse engineer the process,” Solomon explained, adding that TheConservatives.com is all about “empowering” average Americans by letting them see what’s going on and then letting them voice their own opinions.

Solomon’s remarks made it clear: TheConservatives.com has true potential for becoming a great tool in the conservative movement. By connecting people, harnessing and publicizing thoughts and opinions, and enabling people everywhere to benefit from the marketplace of ideas, TheConservatives.com may someday soon revolutionize the heart of conservative leadership.

Allie Winegar Duzett is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.