I've been turning to dailykos recently not just for reading opinions but as an actual news source. Didn't really think about it until Senator Johnson fell ill....
OK, I don't know if this is "substantive" enough, but to be honest, I was too tired to find a proper place to post, and I just feel like a little bit of Friday-night off-the-cuff analysis. Dailykos is defined in the FAQ as "a Democratic blog, a partisan blog", but recently, I have been finding myself almost without thinking, turning to dailykos for news, and not just "Democratic", or "partisan" news, but for news in general. What's remarkable is the level of information that I get from here when compared standard news outlets. This website has lead me to information that has not been carried by the general media. For example , one of more remarkable pieces of information I learned was that polonium-210 is readily available off-the-shelf to the general public (Arken). I have not heard this mentioned anywhere on common media outlets. Then, I was able to get an in-depth analysis by reading the follow-up posts, where I found out that the quantities sold are very small. On a more urgent topic I turned to dailykos to see what was going on with Senator Tim Johnson. www.nytimes.com was informative but not as timely, and CNN wasn't even very informative. The most useful and timely information was provided here, by the people of this community.
These two examples I think are part of a much bigger picture. To me, a part of this website and community is morphing into something much more than partisan blog. In fact, in some aspects it is becoming a clearinghouse for information. Of course, not everything posted is true or relevant , but beauty of it is, in contrast to any other source of information (or pseudo-information), everything gets put under the microscope in the form of comments. Even better, nobody gives anyone here the benefit of the doubt: If we are interested in something here, we check it out ourselves. There is active participation in the dissemination of news, and if you think about it, this is substantially different from watching the TV or reading a newspaper or even it's online extension. Those are all PASSIVE modes. You sit there with Mama spoon-feeding the information to you. What's going on here is a very ACTIVE kind of thing with lots of realtime feedback, that in all probability does a better job of "leaving no stone unturned" than many news agencies.
Putting things in perspective, knowing what's going on is usually the first step to succeeding. There are many people here making substantive contributions on-par with anything you can find out there on topics ranging from finance to Iraq to international policy. It's free, open to the public, and without commercial interruptions. That's not bad for a "partisan blog".