Ripost Is Not a Portal

Every time someone asked what Ripost was, the honest answer was a shrug and a long sentence.

The short version we settled on: Ripost is designed to be an internet platform, not a portal. That sounds like semantics until you have watched what the word “portal” does to a media product in Kosovo. A portal is a front page with twelve boxes on it. A portal has categories nobody clicks. A portal is a newspaper that learned HTML in 2004 and stopped there.

We did not want to build that. We were not sure what we did want to build, which is why the beta looked the way it did.

What was actually in the beta

Shows, like PunPun. News written short, sometimes three sentences short. Lists. Video news. And whatever else the internet could carry that week.

That is a strange product spec. It is also an accurate description of what people were consuming on their phones. Nobody’s evening was organized into Politics, Economy, Culture and Sport. It was a feed, and the feed did not care what format a thing arrived in.

So the format became a variable instead of a constraint. If a story worked better as forty seconds of video, it went out as video. If it worked as a list, it was a list. If it worked as one paragraph, we did not pad it to four to look like journalism.

The founding group was the strategy

Ripost was founded by journalists, programmers, artists, philosophers, hustlers, linguists, animators, designers, freeloaders and businesspeople. That is the official description and it is not a joke, or not only a joke.

Most media companies are founded by journalists who then hire a developer. The developer implements what the journalists imagined, which is a newspaper. When the people arguing about the product include an animator and a philosopher, the arguments go somewhere else. You end up asking what a story is, not just where it goes on the page.

I came in as a founding member working on user experience, web, SEO and optimisation, and later producing. My share of the argument was usually the same question: what does this look like on a phone, six seconds after someone taps it.

Why we never named it

Not a medium in the classical sense. Something new that we ourselves had not named. That was in the description from the start, and it stayed there because it was true.

Naming a category too early is a trap. You pick a name, and then the name starts making decisions for you. Call yourself a news portal and within a month you have a homepage grid, a politics section and someone asking about the print-style layout. Refuse to name it and every feature has to justify itself on its own.

The goal underneath all of it was straightforward enough: promote debate and real values inside Kosovar and Albanian society, and bring the news back into the internet era at a time when collaboration, sharing and reposting are necessities rather than options.

The rest was experiments. Some of them worked.