America: conservatives create another online platform

Posted by Christie Silk on May 27, 2009 at 12:02 PM

A new right-leaning online news site will be launched in the next few weeks, it was announced Tuesday by its founder, Tucker Carlson.
Tucker Carlson.jpg

The DailyCaller, as Carlson explained to conservative bloggers assembled at the Heritage Foundation, will be "a general-interest newspaper-format style site". The ethos of the site was summed up as such, "tell the truth, and be accurate...It's very important to live up to the basic standards of journalism."

Articles will report primarily on the Obama administration and aim to add "facts to the conversation." A specific focus, it seems, is planned for the news site at this point. The 'conversations' do not include that of the future of the Republican Party, an issue which is already comprehensively covered by NewMajority.com. The site was launched earlier this year by Tucker's fellow conservative pundit, David Frum.

The site is based upon the Huffington Post and the Drudge Report models, and seeks to 'drive' the news by privileging speed of publication. The moto of the project, Carlson said, was 'every seven seconds', aiming to be 'even faster than the Drudge.' Its reporters would receive part of the profits depending on how much traffic on the site is attracted by their work.

Conservative pundits and Republican aides have grasped the concept of online news sites as a forum for political critique, to the extent that their digital dialogues rival those of their Democrat counterparts for dynamism. The DailyCaller follows the recent establishment of conservatively skewed FoxNation, the opinion and news site of Fox News. And to crank up the heat of online political exchange even higher, Republicans have begun to use liberal strongholds, such as the HuffPo, as platforms to generate a wider reaching impact.

Source: TheHill.com