In October 2009, I wrote about a Washington, D.C., start-up news website with its sights clearly set on The Washington Post and its local news coverage. It is being powered by the same company that founded Politico.com.
Jim Brady and Steve Buttry, a couple of journalism powerhouses in themselves, have already joined the Allbritton Communications Co.
Then Erik Wemple, the former editor of Washington City Paper, joined.
Already this venture seems incredibly solid, and it still doesn’t have an official name.
Well, now a young, digital journalist has also joined the ranks — Daniel Victor.
Here’s a little of what Steve Buttry posted about Victor:
“Dan will be a community host, joining hosts Jeff Sonderman and Lisa Rowan and social media producer Mandy Jenkins on our community engagement team. We should be hiring another host and a mobile producer soon.
I can’t remember when Daniel first came to my attention, but a year ago, when I led a webinar on Twitter for the American Society of News Editors, I listed him (slide 14 in that link) as a reporter that editors should follow.
Daniel was a pioneering reporter in the outstanding BeatBlogging project based at New York University. I’m not sure whether I connected with him through a blog about the project or through other people’s tweets about his beatblogging work. But I have linked before to his blog and praised his resourcefulness in using digital tools, including these posts on how he used Twitter and Facebook effectively, with traditional reporting skills, to get strong stories. I love the way he engaged the community in his beat coverage as a reporter.”
This unnamed venture is packed with great people. I wish I could work there, but alas, I’m not anywhere Washington, D.C., which is OK. I like it here.
But I digress. Brady has announced how the new site will go about tackling the news.
Here are a few points of interest from the article on Poynter.org:
- Staff of 50, including 20 reporters and seven members of a community engagement team. Erik Wemple and Steve Buttry were brought on for key positions, and a few more hires were announced this week
- Two-Pronged Approach To Presenting News: Give users the top 10 percent of news for Virginia, Maryland and the District — “the stuff everyone cares about” — and the bottom 10 percent that pertain to someone’s neighborhood — “the stuff that really matters to you because it happened a half-mile away.”
- Few, targeted beats
- Aggregation, aggregation, aggregation: original content with culled links
- Geocoding: news classified by ZIP codes
- Politico Mentality: drive day’s conversation, publish early and often even if just paragraph of news
- Useful: provide information that can be used immediately
- No feature stories
- Targeted advertising
This sounds freaking amazing! I’m taking notes and letting my thoughts run wild!
