AllVoices

» see allvoices.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The pitch was 2008's pitch. Professional newsrooms were shrinking and the people standing where things happened all had phones, so build the place where those people file and let software do the work an editor used to do. AllVoices launched that year out of San Francisco and took reports by web form or by MMS and SMS, so a contributor with a feature phone and no computer could still get something up.

Amra Tareen founded it. She had been a venture capitalist, which is an unusual place to start a news company from, and the structure carries the fingerprints. There were patent filings on the tagging and ranking system, and a credibility rating attached to every report that came in.

Half the traffic arrived from outside the United States and the United Kingdom, and reports came in from over 160 countries, so Turkey was inside this map in a way it usually is not on this site. I was not one of the 275,000. Filing to an American news aggregator was not something the Turkish web was doing in 2010; it had its own places to post and its own arguments to have in them.

By January 2010 the numbers were real enough. 275,000 registered citizen reporters and close to five million unique visitors a month, with news desks in thirty cities. AllVoices called itself the largest citizen reporting site in the world, and CNN's iReport, the obvious comparison, had 477,000 registered users against about 2.1 million monthly uniques, so the claim held or failed depending on which number you cared about.

~ the record ~

~ the credibility score ~

The interesting part of AllVoices was the admission built into it. If anyone can file, some of what gets filed is wrong or invented, and the site's answer was to publish it anyway with a number attached saying how far to trust it. The score moved on the contributor's track record and on whether anybody else was carrying the same claim.

Editors have always done this, silently, as a judgment they never show you. AllVoices made it a visible field on the page. It did not work well enough for anyone else to copy, and the platforms that came after went the other direction entirely, toward deleting bad content instead of labeling it, until labeling came back around 2020 wearing different clothes.

~ the exit ~

Datran Media bought AllVoices in May 2011 for a mix of cash and stock that nobody disclosed. Datran was an email marketing and data company, and what it wanted was the crowdsourcing machinery, which it said it would point at categories beyond news and license out to publishers. Tareen became senior vice president of strategy there and the staff moved over with her.

Four months later Datran merged with ContextWeb and the combined company renamed itself PulsePoint on 22 September 2011. AllVoices was now a news site owned by a programmatic advertising platform, which is a position from which nothing good happens slowly.

~ what the domain says now ~

The site kept publishing for four more years with nobody announcing a plan for it. The archive has "Welcome to Allvoices" and a live category bar on 1 August 2015, and by 2 September the same address is titled Pulsepoint and serving the parent company's marketing pages. Nothing in between got captured and nothing was written about it at the time.

allvoices.com today resolves to an HR case-management software company founded in 2017 with no connection to any of this. It bought a name that had been sitting empty. That is the ordinary ending for a domain, and it is why the death is hard to date. The address answered every day through all of it.

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