Opinion Forum

PoliticsDaily

June 12th, 2009

AOL’s MediaGlow, one of their three core businesses, has generated a new website that features political news and commentary, PoliticsDaily.com. The Editor in Chief is Melinda Henneberger, an experienced journalist who was a New York Times reporter for 10 years in their Washington and Rome bureaus.

This seems to be yet another example of the inexorable evolution of the news and commentary business from dirty-fingers newsprint to the internet. As the old media dies a slow economic death, talented journalists and pundits find new or perhaps additional homes in cyberspace. The only question that remains is what we’re going to find to wrap fish in.

In PoliticsDaily: Old-School Journalism in a Dot-Com Package, Henneberger describes PoliticsDaily as “a political news magazine for the general reader updated every day, throughout the day.”

She continues,

Instead of leading off with extravagant claims about how we’re the best thing since Caller ID, what I really want to promise is that we’ll work hard to distinguish ourselves the old-fashioned way, with heavily reported, well-written stories. We’ll offer a mix of straight news and opinion — and a mix of views in our reported commentary. …

What PoliticsDaily.com offers is effectively counter-programming: Instead of attempting to dominate the 10-second news cycle, we mean to offer a thoughtful take on events. We value writing at a moment when the conventional wisdom says that nothing could matter less. Instead of hiring twenty-somethings on the cheap, I’ve favored seasoned folks to the point that our unofficial tagline is “250 years of journalism.”

Take a look at PoliticsDaily. I think you’ll like it.

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: Politics Daily
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