Students launch website to inform teens about politics

In a time when blogs, social networks and mobile devices are the most prevalent tool for communication, entrepreneurs invest time and effort into building the most creative and simple content platforms that aid in informing people about news. 

Fred Feyzi and Shahab Moghadam are two seniors who decided to experiment in a field of political journalism. In the last eight months, Feyzi and Moghadam have launched the  website, The Political Student (thepoliticalstudent.com).

 In short, The Political Student is an ambitious business model designed to engage young people in the realm of politics, technology and health.

Feyzi said he started the company because many of the traditional newspaper articles he came across were difficult to understand. 

“I had to force myself to continue reading,” Feyzi said. “I wanted to create a news site that was targeted to an audience under the age of 30. I envisioned articles to be in an informal tone so all readers could understand what really was going on.”

The idea soon materialized and was named The Political Student (TPS) in December 2011. After the business model was laid out, Feyzi began building the website with the help of senior Jasmit Kakkar. Feyzi chose Kakkar to contribute to the website since he had previous animation experience. 

“We planned to have a lot of simple animations that would have voice-overs in order to breakdown current news, politics and legislations,” Feyzi said. 

A fundraising and content team was then needed to make TPS a complete news engine. After recruiting Kakkar to the TPS team, Feyzi looked for a strong writer who had valuable connections and fundraising skills which could attract possible sponsors. Feyzi recruited senior Shahab Moghadam. 

“I knew Shahab was very involved with the political community,” Feyzi said. “I felt he would be the perfect addition to jumpstart the efficiency and contents of the company.”

After forming a well-versed team and building a preliminary website, TPS went through many site modifications until the website was finally launched late this summer. 

“We’re really surprised with our success. We have around 1,500 hits to our websites. Almost all of them are outside of our community,” said Moghadam. 

Apart from the website traffic, they have attracted attention on social media sites such as Facebook and Google+. 

TPS has recently been expanding its team, which now includes seniors Tavius Woods, director of creative affairs, and Michal Kranz, vice president of business operations. 

“We will be using the money for mobile testing and to increase website speed. More information will be coming out later,” said Moghadam. 

Moghadam went on to say that TPS’s partially non-profit statusdictates that they use some of the money for “altruistic purposes” as well.

Recently, TPS has also made plans to publish a mobile application for iPhones that serves to inform readers on the go about major news and to expand the company’s users. 

“TPS also has a mobile application being built currently. It was created so that people could view the website, check [TPS’s] Facebook page, tweet out to TPS, view videos on the YouTube page and comment on certain issues,” said Feyzi. 

According to TPS, the company shares a unique category of content that isn’t found on many other sites. 

 “I like the fact that it has articles on subjects that I might not have read about in traditional news websites or heard about on news shows,” said senior David Ball. “High school students are more likely to read news if it is written by a peer than a random reporter. I think that once this site's audience grows it will catch on and be a great success.”