If New York has The Times and San Francisco The Chronicle, then the digital world has The Daily Dot – the first online newspaper exclusively dedicated to news about the Internet. Backed by the Los Angeles based investor Nova Spivack, the Daily Dot was founded in August 2011. As CEO Nick White told me, the “core job” of the Daily Dot is to “tell the story of the Internet.” And, so far, they seem to be doing a fairly credible job. Indeed, with $3 million “committed” in funding, over a million uniques a month, a staff of around 15 editors, White claims that the Daily Dot is covering news “relevant” to users. Perhaps. But, as White acknowledged to me, the free paper needs to get to three or four million monthly uniques by the end of its second year if it is to generate the advertising revenue necessary to become a viable business. So the bigger question remains: Does the Internet really need its own daily newspaper? Or is the Daily Dot just one more online journalistic start-up doomed to failure?
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Everyday through sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and other social media, we share pictures, news, and opinions on a global scale.One entrepreneur decided to bring all of that together on one site called The Daily Dot.
A very well known Austin writer is joining in this effort to create a hometown newspaper of sorts for the World Wide Web. Austin Powell, formerly a columnist with the Austin Chronicle, spoke to KVUE about The Daily Dot.
"In an anachronistic joke, The Daily Dot, a media news site, released a print edition at this year's SXSW. Befitting an old-media technology, they hired a team of newsies to hand out the broadsheets."
New blogs launch all the time, but The Daily Dot launched today with a well-known team of backers, $600,000 in the bank and a focus on using data analysis to unearth the stories of people online. The Dot says it wants to be the "home town newspaper" for all the different social networks and communities on the web - and it uses math to find its way.
If the Internet is the public square of the 21st century, the Daily Dot wants to be its town crier. The newly launched online media startup is trying an experiment in community journalism, where the community is the web. It's an interesting vision, and one that looks to capitalize on the amount of time people are spending online.
"Like the past few years at SXSW, the buzz over the past week came down to what apps are hot and what are not. But the deeper questions will go unanswered for quite some time. We do not know what the data says about the direction for new apps such as Highlight or Forecast. We can only speculate how the community will shape the identity of the apps that got the buzz. Until then, the only ones who may have a clue are the technologists themselves. But that depends on how well they are studying their own data and the relative activity of the users, the churn rate and any other host of factors."
"I've never been that good at memes. I may have a pretty reliable stock of YouTube videos with which I could amuse the average non-Internet person, but compared to some Web residents, I have no idea what's going on. That's why I read The Daily Dot. It's the Internet's hometown newspaper. When I don't know the significance of some weird video or graphic people are sharing, that's where I turn to learn more.
Internet culture was on full display in person this week at South by Southwest, and I got a chance to sit down with Owen Thomas, founding editor of The Daily Dot, to talk about how they cover the Web not as a tool, like we do at RWW, but as a place."
"Everyday through sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and other social media, we share pictures, news, and opinions on a global scale.
One entrepreneur decided to bring all of that together on one site called The Daily Dot.
A very well known Austin writer is joining in this effort to create a hometown newspaper of sorts for the World Wide Web. Austin Powell, formerly a columnist with the Austin Chronicle, spoke to KVUE about The Daily Dot."
"Mashable is delighted to announce that 14 new publishers have joined the Mashable Publisher Platform, our editorially curated syndication offering that brings content from select publishers to our site.
Since introducing the platform at the Mashable Media Summit in November, we’ve been able to add a diverse mix of content from our initial launch partners to Mashable, from ways to bring your Instagram photos to life, to how to control your dreams with your iPhone, to advice on how journalists can best use Pinterest — our partner content goes deeper into the topics you care about most."
Are social sites like Reddit, Tumblr and YouTube communities that are just as worthy of news coverage as local towns? If so what would a community newspaper covering these disparate and little-understood groups of people look like?
A new news site, the Daily Dot, attempts to answer that question.
