Patriot Daily is a new member of the Daily Kos community, celebrating our six month anniversary this month! In addition to our regular dKos diaries, we have a news wire and blog at Patriot Daily that is designed to accomplish specific goals for the liberal and progressive blogosphere.
Patriot Daily’s objectives include: (1) providing an easily navigable site that contains major but neglected daily news from blogs and other online sources as an answer to the question frequently asked by non-blogging friends, neighbors, and voters in general: “Where do you find the news?”; (2) Organizing articles and clips by subject categories so that progressives and liberals could easily find a source to cite when writing posts, diaries or articles, and (3) Countering the Bush spin by providing real news to the politically inactive and those unregistered voters who so badly need real facts at election time.
Since we’re new and since our goals are big, we’re hoping fellow kossacks can reach out and touch us with their advice and wisdom!
Here’s my analysis of our goals:
Goal #1 was very easy to achieve because TV news does not cover real news. In fact, a recent study found that the number of MSM news outlets continue to increase while the “number of stories covered and the depth of many reports is decreasing.” The study concluded that “consumers need to get information from a variety of sources to understand the world around them.”
We want Patriot Daily to be a major actor among that variety of sources. We’re hoping Kossacks kick in and participate on the site when we add commenting so that we can carry the quality of both information and analysis found here to our new site.
My main question is about #3.
Goal #3: Reaching unregistered voters or people not politically active is not an easy task.
There are anecdotal reasons that #3 became a goal. Prior to creating Patriot Daily, when I stood in line at the grocery store or other destinations for my errands, I would just casually mention how I could not believe X (some major news story about the Bush administration that was not covered by TV news) that I had just read from a specific newspaper online. I was nonpartisan in order to avoid heated, partisan debates that can end nowhere but a shout down and people reached out to discuss X. Sometimes the whole checkout line would participate in the discussion. There were actually times that people said that they were going to have to vote next time because this X was just wrong. People were eager for real news rather than the standard TV fare of sex, scandals, crimes and missing people. So, I thought, we must do something to get this real news out there to counteract all the spin and lies from our great corporate media that really function as an extension of the White House press office and, now, have actually moved into the White House press office.
The difference in news coverage of the Iraq War and Katrina is another example of why I don’t think that goal # 3 is naïve or unrealistic. It took 2 years after the war had started for many people to learn the truth about the Iraq war. A study found that people were more likely to believe false statements about the war if they had obtained their news from TV. Sixty percent believed at least one of these lies: US troops found evidence of prewar links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, troops found WMDs in Iraq and world public opinion supported the war. Eighty percent of the people who believed these lies had obtained their news from TV. Today, a majority of Americans do not support the Iraq war. But what would have happened if the biased media coverage had not prevented the truth from reaching the public before the war?
Katrina answered that question. Katrina showed that when the public are provided real news, partisan spin machines fail. Statements by FEMA and Homeland Security that all was well in New Orleans did not carry weight when the true state of affairs was presented to the people, both in print and TV media.
The problem is that our stats, e-mails and other data show that a good chunk of our readers are people who were politically active before they found PD as they clicked on a link from a political blog or website or heard us mentioned on a political talk show on the radio.
So, how do you reach people who are not politically active? Some people say we need to advertise. If so, where should we place the ads and how does a web site not run by rich, deep pockets pay for ads? Are there political groups or donors that would pay for ads? Or, is there an alternative to advertising?
Many readers have asked us to sign them up for our newsletter, but we don’t have any newsletter. This may be another way to reach people, but frankly I am not clear as to the purpose of newsletters sent by e-mail. The material is online at our website, so what function is served by newsletters? And, in any event, does not the newsletter just reach our existing readers who are politically active? If a newsletter is a good idea, how does one create and distribute a newsletter — Is there a program or script we need to use?
As the midterm elections approach, we need to expand our reach to obtain our goals.
If I still have your attention, I would be interested in any feedback with goal #2, to provide a reference resource for progressives and liberals to easily find a source to cite when writing posts, diaries or articles. As noted below, we currently do not have user commenting capability so we almost live in an online vacuum so it would be nice to hear advise on #2. We have become so spoiled by the live interaction at kos.
Some background information before my questions on #2:
Structure of site: The site is organized into (1) <u>Headline News</u> (middle column) which covers all subjects; (2) <u>Daily News</u> (middle column under Headline News – need to scroll down) which is organized into 14 major news categories so that users don’t have to browse all stories to find news on a desired topic and (3) <u>News Archives</u>(left top sidebar menu), which is organized by subjects on 2 or 3 category levels, depending upon the particular topic. And, the site has <u>Hot Topic</u> links (located under Tip Jar on left sidebar).
New Features: When we went online, certain features to our software program were supposed to be available within a few weeks, and now it has stretched out to months and months. These new features include: (a) user ability to post comments on blog entries and news stories; (b) a really functional search engine to retrieve articles from the over 20,000 articles database in our News Archives, (c) each blog post and news story link will have tags to the appropriate subject category (and our subject categories in News Archives will be revised), and (d) we will have the capability to post only stories from the current date in our Daily News column (at present stories from prior dates appear in column as well as current date). And, we will be changing our color scheme to shades of blue and gray.
Questions:
(1) Does our structure of Headline News, Daily News and News Archive make sense or is it confusing?
(2) Our posting format is title of news story and brief description so users can get a better idea of whether they want to click onto the link to read the story. However, most sites just do the title. Should we can the brief description so that there is less to read per entry?
(3) Unlike right-wing sites that may often be financed by rich folks, liberal sites need to have their tip jar or donate button to pay for expenses. Our donate button includes major credit cards, bank debit cards and paypal, but it is operated by paypal, which many users don’t like as they have had bad experiences with paypal. Is there another company that provides a similar service that would include the options of credit cards and bank debit cards?
(4) Should we have additional features on our site?
Jeralyn Merritt at TalkLeft has already been very helpful in suggesting some changes that we have already made (such as removing a news scroller) and some which can not be implemented until we get our new features. We would love additional advice from both bloggers who have their own websites and people who don’t have websites but need to get their daily fix of news.
A very sincere thanks in advance for your comments and advice.
Patriot Daily: News of the day, just a click away!
