DailyKos.com gets some high praise from
The Chronicle of Higher Education's current (May 26) issue. Here's the opening of the article,
Political Blogs: the New Iowa?, by David D. Perlmutter, senior fellow at Louisiana State University's Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs and associate professor of mass communication in Baton Rouge. (Perlmutter edits a political-analysis blog (
http://www.policybyblog.squarespace.com) and is writing a book on political blogs for Oxford University Press):
Like many political junkies, I get my news and opinion fixes from newspapers, television, and specialty newsletters. But I also rely increasingly on blogs, the Web pages that contain both interactive, hyperlinked reportage and commentary. Such information sources are no longer curiosities.
For example, Daily Kos (http://www.dailykos.com) started by Markos Moulitsas Zúniga...
(Out of space, more below...)
...who served in the U.S. Army before going to college and law school -- includes contributions from a giant group of leftist, liberal, and Democratic bloggers.
The Nielsen//NetRatings service reported that in the single month of July 2005, Kos attracted 4.8 million separate visitors. The Kos audience is thus greater than the combined populations of Iowa, where the first presidential caucus takes place, and New Hampshire, site of the first primary, according to the current Democratic party schedule.
The Chronicle of Higher Education is arguably just what it claims to be: "the No. 1 source of news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty members and administrators" in the U.S., and one of the leading trade publications for academic professionals in the English-speaking world. Usually, it's good stuff -- sort of a New York Review of Books for academicians.
The Chronicle publishes Arts & Letters Daily online, IMO the best site for wide-ranging, well-written articles on culture and ideas you'll find anywhere, with occasional ventures into serious contemporary what's-it-all-aboutness. Sort of a Drudge Report for people who enjoy thinking. A&LD audits about 10 million page views a month with 800,000 unique visitors.
A&LD's editor, Dennis Dutton, is a personal hero, a philosophy professor who abandoned Southern California for a cushy chair as professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.
A&LD is conservative in the classical, respectable sense -- principled, occasionally pedantic, with intellectually provocative selections, but hardly ever propagandistic.
When things get slow at DailyKos (like the 3:30 a.m. EST Twilight Zone) I can always find something interesting to read at A&LD.
All this means is that DailyKos is breaking into the bigtime as a serious force, as well as a profound forum. I've known it to be that since I joined this community a couple years ago. It's interesting now to see some of the rest of the world catching up.
It will be more interesting when the rest of the world acknowledges that the best and brightest authentic progressive political ideas find their way to DailyKos first, and that this site not only accommodates those ideas but incubates them.
I'm hopeful that as this community grows and evolves into the singular force that saves the world from the criminal corruption of neoconservatism, some of our sillier pastimes -- flame wars, pie fights and troll patrols -- will lose some of their allure.
Sorry for all the gushy rah-rah, but I really believe DailyKos is the New World.