This week was an especially exciting week in the world of the Daily Dot. The alpha version of our site is up. We were the first news organization to report the way Congressman Anthony Weiner’s Twitter account was likely “hacked.” And we released the list of the 1,000 most influential people on Reddit.
We have lots of exciting plans for our site, and I’m pleased to be able to say that even the alpha version boasts a pretty cool and unique feature. If you follow the links above you’ll get to the stories we’ve written, on our own site with our own branding, but you can’t get anywhere else!
When you launch a new publication you face a key dilemma. You want to get out early and iterate often, especially when you’re a publication like ours that’s built around a new coverage area and you’ve got a lot of questions, a lot of unknowns still to figure out. Questions are best answered not in some dark closet, but by getting something out there to see how people react.
On the other hand, no one wants to go to a publisher’s website and see it half-baked. We don’t have that kind of patience.
So we have these solo article pages which allow us to produce news and distribute it over social media or other channels and gauge reactions. But we’re not letting people wander around the parts of the store that are still under construction. Think of this approach in contrast to big launches like News Corp’s debut of The Daily iPad app — not that we had $30 million to blow before even opening the doors. But our financial constraints have forced us to come up with what I think is the very best way to launch media.
Then there was the excitement in the newsroom Wednesday night. A few intrepid bloggers found out that the picture-sharing service used to send the now infamous bulging-undies shot to Weiner’s Twitter account was not especially secure. The company denied the problem, of course. But they also took down the particular feature we called attention to.
This was our first big story as a newsroom, and it was, of course, a ton of fun. There was action and excitement, tracking people down and verifying facts — and all the human drama, from CEOs that didn’t want to admit imperfection to conspiracy theorists who were sure it was more of a problem than it was. It was great. It reminded me why newsrooms are the most fun place in the entire world.
Finally, today we told the world who the 1,000 most influential people on Reddit are. This is a key part of our strategy. In the end, what will ensure our success is knowing our communities better than anyone — and that means using the traditional reporting playbook and entirely new forms of data-driven journalism. No one has gone to this kind of trouble to know the online community so deeply and in so many dimensions.
But this release is just the opening move, merely the tip of the iceberg — you’ll see more as we continue to slice and dice Reddit, we’ll create public leaderboards. We’ll then use those ourselves to inspire new story ideas. We’ll be doing the same and more for other communities. Already we’ve learned how much we don’t know we don’t know. Seeing the data for the first time has been both humbling and exhilarating.
And sharing it with readers? Even more so.