With hundreds of astute, eagle-eyed news scanners watching every outlet from Fox to al Jazeera, why can't dailyKos compete and win in the space currently occupied by sites such as Drudge?
As a community, we have the talent to make a page that digs up the most insightful articles available, adds to them with thoughtful editorials, and even splices in articles created from firsthand information.
We have all the makings of a kick-ass news service that can generate both more revenue and interest for dailyKos. And best of all, it requires only some tiny changes.
I've been kicking this around for a couple of diaries. The goal is to end up with a kos news page that can serve as a home page and a kind of alternate entry to dailyKos.
Kos news would not feature every post or diary from the site. Instead it would depend on the good sense of kos posters to determine what appeared in the news.
Hears how it could work:
- Every time you post a diary, you would have the chance to assign it a "news category" such as science, congress, Iraq. Obviously, not every diary would be "newsworthy." For example, this diary is not news on any scale. Addinq a news category could be as simple as adding a special character to the title of your diary, or marking it in some other way (I leave that to the coding gods). But marking it as news would be up to you.
- A page would be created, in addition to the normal kos home page. This page would have a different layout, designed to showcase "news diaries." The stories that appeared on this page would be arranged based on category, creation time, and diary recommendations.
- The normal dailyKos would not be affected at all by kos news. Diaries would be created as usual. Recommendations would behave as normal. The only difference would be that kos news would give even more readers a chance to see diaries.
If the kos news page existed, I'd mark it as my home paqe. Drudge has gotten famous by nothing more than stealing headlines and popping a very rare original article. Kos news could beat that site, and every similar site, right or left, thanks to the hard work kos posters are already putting into their diaries.