The Baltimore Herald

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

I’m not from Baltimore and the only thing I like about the Orioles is that they lost in ’69 to the Mets.

Still I am a Cliffs Notes Character, so shallow my most substantial dimension is length.

One of the ways I yell louder is my contribution to Overnight News Digest where I’m celebratimg my one year anniversary in Magnifico’s house, the most valuable new feature of dKos since Diary Rescue according to Meteor Blades.

Outside of some early meta news digests my format has been kind of stable.

I use Yahoo News.  CNN and MSNBC are mere single sources and really offer no more variety than The New York Times and The Washington Post and I suppose if you’re a serious news junky you have dozens of these sites book marked in your browser and monitor them periodically.  If you have a great passion for variety nothing beats Google News where you can find hundreds of sources for any given story, but a limited number of them.

Yahoo covers a broad range of topics from the major wire sevices- AP, Reuters, and AFP as well as some limited offbeat sources like McClatchy (World News), The Christian Science Monitor (Top Stories) and Time Magazine (U.S. News and World News).  The topics I cover for Overnight News Digest are Top Stories, Most Popular (a meta indicator), World, U.S. News, Politics, Business, and Science.

I kind of like my product.  It is not simply the front page of Yahoo News, it is instead carefully filtered by a human being to include stories that interest me or that I think will interest you as a casual reader, and references to mainstream media sources that you can use to inspire a diary or buttress an argument.

I produce this piece of magic 3 times a week, Tuesday nights as Overnight News Digest and The Morning News, and Saturday and Sunday as Weekend News Digest.

Having done this for pretty much a year now I have observed that there is enough New news that if you don’t insist on 54 story tomes you could publish maybe even twice a day- a morning and evening edition.

Of course you couldn’t do that here on dKos where you are limited to one diary a day mind you, but it just so happens that I am in possesion of a valuable piece of Net-estate- The Baltimore Herald.

Now this is courtesy of pacified who owns all the ads, but it is (as near as I can tell) a fully functional Soapblox playground of blogging fantasy.

My core concept is this- twice a day we would post a series of 15 diaries.

15!  30 A DAY!?

Don’t worry. they’re short diaries.  It’s all about the tags.

Over on the right hand side of the page are 17 links to 17 tags

• World
• Africa
• Asia
• Australia
• Europe
• North America (English and French speaking)
• South America (Spanish speaking)
• Antarctica (Penguin speaking)
• U.S.
• News/Politics
• Media
• Entertainment
• Business
• Science
• Health
• Sports
• Not News!

Front Page Diaries are throw away vessels for the four or 21 stories that fit in their particular category.  You can certainly comment on any particular content and feel free to contribute story links, but if you have more than one or two…

Why not publish a diary with the correct tag or tags so you show up in our aggregator of doom?

Now World and U.S. are simply collections of their sub topics which wouldn’t get their own Front Page diary and I think many cycles of news will pass before the penguin speaking part of the world demands much attention so there’s a certain flexibility to the system.

Not News! deserves recognition as a place to park meta and personal issues so that they get some attention. I have endevoured in this model to give maximum recognition to contributor diaries and minimize the importance of the Front Page which will be subject to thrashing traffic in exchange for granularity.

About Shouting Louder

I don’t think that personally for me it’s going to be that difficult to come up with 60 stories a day that are worthy of your attention.  Frankly many of my proposed categories are going to be ignored because I have no interest in any sport except America’s Cup yacht racing.  Still the average is going to be 4 or 5 stories a category which is about what I’m looking for.

BUT I DO NOT INTEND TO DO THIS ALONE!

You dear sucker valued contributor are essential to my plan to take over the world with pastel colored boxes!

While I have access to the style sheet for DocuDharma I have to admit that I don’t understand it much.  So I’m hoping to impose on someone for my web design.

For now, because the site is not set up yet, I’d like to have people volunteer here and there and let me set up accounts for them.  I’m looking for Contributing Editors and Admins.  You like Entertainment and are willing to handle it once a week?  We should chat.

And while I’m not exactly proposing a site for chat (for one thing I’d have to get all meta about what is and is not polite conversation) I am proposing a site where you can easily search for and contribute content.  Tag your diary correctly and you’ll be pretty permanently linked to the Front Page even without awesome powers and abilities.  I expect the diary list will not scroll as fast as the Front Page but it will be open to random contributions.

In terms of diary format I like my style and contend it is superior.

I find Headlines engaging and informative even when they’re a pack of lies like most diary titles.  They certainly attract my attention.  In my limited experience as a news picker I’ve noticed particular authors are more obnoxious than others which is why you should credit them and old news is… old.

Your commentary is of course timeless and can be as extensive as you want.

If you have even 3 stories that hang together in one of the pigeon holes, tag it and bag it and you’ll turn up on the bookmark like The Stars Hollow Gazette.  I don’t mean to straight jacket people’s creativity but you should seperate your colors and fabrics (meaning keep a collection of stories within the categories I list above).  In the Front Page pieces a nice feature would be to collect the headline links and feature them above the fold so you can just click through.

I’m thinking this would be a useful tool for people and I’m not intending to devote too much of my personal time to it, but I can spare a couple of hours a day to story pick.  It is not my intention to substitute for anything that is currently happening on dKos with Overnight News Digest or on DocuDharma with 4 @ 4, the DocuDharma Times, or Weekend News Digest; but to extend and enhance that resource.

Or maybe I’m totally misguided.

Your thoughts below.