Do Reddit, 4Chan, and Digg Need Their Own Hometown Newspaper? The Daily Dot Hopes So.

Nitasha Tiku — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 09:06:42 -0400

The idea behind The Daily Dot, a new website that just emerged from invite-only private beta today, sounds like a great premise for an infographic. "Day-to-day coverage will focus on ‘neighborhoods.’ Sites like Reddit, like Digg and like Etsy are really like cities. And the web is like a large country of itself,” founding editor Owen Thomas told his former colleagues at VentureBeat. It's easy enough to picture an illustrator going to town with a map of the internet and Etsy's cutesy, cuddly cul-de-sac next to 4Chan's lawless urban sprawl.

But is it enough to carry an entire newspaper?

The online-only news outlet was founded by Nova Spivack, a serial entrepreneur and investor in Klout, as well as CEO Nicholas White, who quit his family's 179-year-old newspaper company to join the start-up. So far, they have raised $600,000 for media execs and investors with commitments for more if necessary.

The wink-and-nod to web natives is apparent from the datelines--which feature the icons for the community, such as Reddit or Twitter, that the article is about--to the gamified leaderboard, which show profiles of the top people from communities like Tumblr along with a "Dot score."

VentureBeat points out that Daily Dot plans to apply traditional journalism techniques to covering these internet "cities" like a real community. But here's where we think the hometown paper concept might not catch on. The appeal of communities like Reddit or 4Chan to day-in, day-out residents, as it were, is partly its insularity and the fact that a noob might easily get lost in them there woods. If we were pitching The Daily Dot, we'd say it sounds more like a way to report the news in those communities to the norms.

Betabeat » hometown paper

Do Reddit, 4Chan, and Digg Need Their Own Hometown Newspaper? The Daily Dot Hopes So.