A note from the Daily Dot’s CEO
We brought everyone currently on the team together in Austin this week. We’ve managed to spread our delusions of grandeur around to a few people like so many carrier pigeons, and so now it’s time to actually get to work.
The most important thing to do this week was to begin to establish our organizing principle, our common goal.
But what does that look like for a newspaper?
In our discussions this week, several concepts kept coming back up: People, for one. We think online communities are important and they deserve coverage, because that’s where people, their passions, and their relationships are.
Honesty also matters. Above all else we want to tell people’s stories accurately, and be transparent about where information came from.
Respect, for another. If Nixon is a dirty fucking crook (per Hunter Thompson), then we will report as much. We cannot shirk our duty.
But we should also have respect and compassion for him. Nixon was ambition and paranoia driven to monstrous proportions. But he was an American monster.
Finally, we talked a lot about leaving behind a record.
Shelley’s Ozymandias reveals a basic human need: “look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.” The desire to leave a mark is not reserved to pharaohs. We all want the universe to recognize, if only for a second, that we were here. That’s the basic impulse behind newspapers.
Newspapers are record-keeping institutions. There’s nothing so special about the paper — the library at Alexandria is no less lost for its reliance on paper. Whatever the medium, pixels or paper or whatever else, the medium isn’t the product, the record is the product.
So what we’ve got so far is: We record what people do online with respect. It’s just a draft. This is not something you really toss off in an afternoon, it’s far too important. But this is the news business, we’ll get to do it all again tomorrow.
— Nick White
CEO and Cofounder, the Daily Dot
Photo by NS Newsflash/Flickr