This Week at PolicyMic: Kwaku Osei Blows Up on Twitter, Lady Gaga's Born This Way Foundation, & Your Feedback

Culture

It is Friday, so it is time to highlight PolicyMic's big successes this week:

1) Kwaku Osei, born in Ghana and educated at Yale, published the most viewed story this week on Boko Haram and the Nigerian government, which absolutely blew up on Twitter. Kwaku argued that despite Nigeria's recent troubles, the real threat to the state is the people's lack of trust of the government. The story got over 6,000 views!

Mia Pskowski wins the most shared story of the week with her piece on Valentine's Day stereotypes asking whether Americans are stuck in a 'Mad Men' mentality when it comes to relationships. The piece was shared 127 times, and she got 3,125 views and 16 mics. 

Kate Brandt scored another big success with her piece on whether the U.S. should be concerned about Australia's energy security model. The article was picked up by an energy, food, and sustainability blog in New Zealand.

Great job this week pundits!

2) PolicyMic has been granted exclusive press access to cover the upcoming launch of Lady Gaga's Born This Way Foundation at Harvard, which will work to empower youth and combat anti-gay teen bullying. In true PM fashion, we'll be hosting a competition next week for high schools journalists across the country to determine which rockstar young reporter will get to cover the event and conduct some cool live interviews. Stay tuned for more.

3) For the past two days, co-founder Chris Altchek and editor Jordan Wolf have been up in Cambridge at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, working with their Youth & Media team to brainstorm new ideas about how to improve the quality of the information on PolicyMic and make our site more engaging for young people. They are also discussing core challenges like how to make our site more democratic. Check out the Youth & Media site here

Feedback for the week. We're constantly thinking about how to improve the quality of writing on the site, and encourage pundits to include more data and hard facts in their posts. Two questions: (1) What has been the best article you have read on the site and why? (2) Do we do a good enough job at measuring the quality of articles with our Mic system? How could we use Mics to encourage higher quality articles?