We all love dailykos, and most of us are visiting the site at least 2 or 3 times per day. The impact of the site is profound, and we continue to see amazing phenomena such as the Halter campaign flourishing in Arkansas, due largely to this and related websites.
In view of the great success of dailykos the time has probably come for a "WeeklyKos," much in the same way that great newspapers have special editions once per week, or that the Washington Post organization has its weekly Newsweek.
Daily and weekly news/media have different functions. A weekly can address issues in a broader and more ambitious way than a daily can. Daily stories come and go in a few hours - great diaries mingle with stories about cats & dogs or trivia and quickly fade from memory. Our awareness is fragmented by being deluged with millions of stories, so we don't have special time to reflect on many of them.
How can the WeeklyKos be created? It could be very simple...!
The simplest approach of all would be to build the core of Weekly Kos around the best material from the Recommended List on dailykos. However, the Weekly Kos could/should me more than merely an extension of the recommended list itself. Other materials could be added by the kos website editors, selected from those that almost made the 'rec list.'
What else?
Here is the most important point:
The content would be divided into sections of the WeeklyKos home page, as it is divided in the major newsweeklies (Time, Newsweek, USNews, etc).
There would be sections on domestic and international news (major stories of ongoing interest, rather than transitory 'blips'), as well as science, medicine, literature, entertainment, the arts, etc. There could be a "Green" section for environmental stories that wouldn't otherwise be noticed. There could be announcements for major cultural events, features on places to visit (Travel), etc. It could be very exciting, and all based on the successful dailykos model itself.
"Ok," you say.... Let's imagine doing a WeeklyKos... "How would it work?" That is, how would the diaries be selected? Would it still be democratic/interactive? What about the reader rating system?
One proposal might be that the stories would be put into sections by kos editors, and another might be that the readers themselves might have some new "recommend" options.
For example, readers could recommend a diary for the WeeklyKos, as well as recommending it for the dailykos 'rec list.' In addition, those stories that make the dailykos 'rec list' can be nominated for various sections of the WeeklyKos (science, domestic, politics, international, etc).
To stay on the WeeklyKos, again, reader recommendations would play an important role. If a story starts to receive less 'recommends, it would drift to the bottom of the list, and, at any rate, any story will have a shelf life of ≤7 days.
Diary updates might in some extraordinary cases be of such great interest that they would be extended, by popular demand...
In addition, it would be interesting to have an opinion or editorial section, as we currently have, where special editors and writers (kos, meteor blades, etc.) would have columns. These columns could be taken directly from the best of the dailykos, thereby maximizing the impact of these writers.
What do you think? Share your thoughts - maybe we can help do something exciting like this. This is just a sketch, & your contributions might play an important role in making this idea into a reality. It seems likely that a WeeklyKos has already been thought about - maybe the meme is floating around in cyberspace - and if it wasn't before, then it is now...