What was Balance the Ballot?
Balance the Ballot (BtB) was a student ran Instagram-base unbiased news publication aimed at high school and early university students with short format posts regarding issues such as politics, the environment and science. Over the course of 3 years it grew to nearly 15,000 followers and over 50 volunteer writers and designers from all over the world. By 2020 our posts were viewed by more than 2 million people per month, while some of our stories had quicker turn-around times than major news services.
What was my role?
As the Head of Article Production, I assisted our diverse team of writers (up to 50 people) in creating the quality content we were known for. My responsibilities included the management of writers, coordination with external contributors, and the media team, as well as providing ideas for recurring series, and special ‘dispatch’ writing teams. Among our most important achievements was our success in sharing OSINT-confirmed news during the 2019 Venezuela Presidential Crisis faster than major news sources such as CNN & BBC.
During 2020, as our team grew considerably and hands-on management was not required, I developed a writer evaluation tool using NLP in Python which automatically ingested and reviewed all posted articles, rating author language, bias, and engagement.