PolitiFact

PolitiFact is the first website to win the Pultizer Prize and it started as a conversation between two reporters who had never built or run a website before.

St. Petersburg Times Washington Bureau Chief Bill Adair approached Matt Waite in May 2007 with the proverbial sketch on a cocktail napkin. Matt put that sketch into code. The two collaborated closely, exchanging ideas, taking the site in new directions and pushing the Times to launch a new kind of website.

PolitiFact takes a philosophy of using structured data to drive a website and applies it to an old form of journalism: the truth squad story. Every story about how true a statement from a politician is has a similar structure — a person, a ruling, subjects, sources, etc. PolitiFact is the first site to harness that structure and use it to power a more advanced form of online journalism. From the beginning, it’s been an experiment.

PolitiFact was so experimental that there were plans to shut it off after the Florida primary if it didn’t find an audience. That it did find an audience was gratifying. That it won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting is still a shock the site’s staff.

And it continues to evolve. The site is now becoming an experiment in new business models. PolitiFact now franchises the Truth-O-Meter to different states. PolitiFact partners with a media partner in a state, that partner provides staff to write local fact-checks. The partner controls their content and their ad inventory and pays PolitiFact to license the brand and maintain the site.

The heart of PolitiFact is the Truth-O-Meter and if forms the core of a design philosophy at Hot Type: The atomic unit of the site.

The atomic unit of a site is the building block, the smallest unit that your site is built around. As we were building PolitiFact, the mantra was “the meter is the thing.” That philosophy keeps a site focused on what makes it special. It helps keep it simple.

The atomic unit philosophy drives many of the sites we’ve built. The mug is the atomic unit of Tampa Bay Mug Shots, the bank is the atomic unit of Banktracker, the school district is the atomic unit of Edmoney.org. Each of those sites are built around those atomic units, leading people to them.

With PolitiFact, the focus on the meter and the use of structure allows for a user to explore the more than 3,000 fact check items in the database in multiple ways: by person, by subject, by ruling.