The Daily Kos community features a wealth of writing talent, so much so, that our email “share” newsletter, which features the hottest content from Daily Kos, is utterly dominated by non-staff written content. Same with our Facebook page.
What that means is that the best way to find your stories/diaries on the site is no longer the front page. Stuff that barely gets noticed on the site blows up massively on social media, sometimes days, weeks or even years after being written. When we note something taking off, we amplify it via Facebook and our email list. Sometimes, stuff gets amplified without us lifting a finger.
Some pieces can get hundreds of comments and get zero wider traction beyond the community. Other stuff can get thousands of shares, and hang there with 3-4 comments. None of this is to suggest that one way is better than the other, just to note that any measure of success is much more complicated today than it used to be. It’s no longer as simple as “got noticed on recent list, jumped to recommend list!” And we at HQ are just as excited to promote hot community content via our various channels as we are promoting our own staff written stuff. Internally, there is no difference between the two. Heck, if I could, I’d hire everyone! But since we can’t do that, at least we can treat everyone’s content the same.
(And if you don’t believe me, pull out the share emails from your email trash and try to find the last time one of my own pieces was promoted on the list, or peruse our Facebook site to see when was the last time my stuff was pushed externally. Short answer, a long f’n time ago. That’s democratized promotion!)
Still, there is one long-running tradition at Daily Kos and I’m excited has remained: every year we promote three writers to “Contributing Editor” status, which means they get extra visibility, at least within Daily Kos proper (see above re: democratized promotion). Contributing Editors (hey look, we finally updated our masthead!) generally provide weekend content, though their material can appear on the Daily Kos front page throughout the week depending on the news cycle and what they write (they are not assigned stories by editors).
I live in perpetual fear of stagnation, and nothing keeps Daily Kos fresh like the steady inclusion of new voices. The old blogosphere may be dead, but the tradition of giving people a larger soapbox lives on.
So without further ado, this year’s class consists of Molly Weasley, Chauncey DeVega, and David Akadjian. Join me in welcoming them to the front page! Bios below.
Molly Weasley (Sher Watts Spooner)
Sher Watts Spooner has spent more than 30 years as a reporter and editor at one national weekly and three daily newspapers in three states. She has covered and edited everything from education to politics to health care and is a self-admitted political and media junkie. You might have seen her diaries at Daily Kos under the user name Molly Weasley, chosen after the Weasley mom totally kicked butt in the seventh Harry Potter book.
Sher is now a free-lance writer and editor, and handles social media for a volunteer tutoring program in Chicago. She is also the author of The Political Blogging Murder, the first installment of the Political Murder mystery series, and working on the sequel, Off With His Talking Head.
You can read her website, including the historical and often quirky “political murder of the day,” at politicalmurder.com. You can follow her on Twitter at @SherSpooner.
Chauncey DeVega
Chauncey DeVega is a Chicago-based writer and educator. He is also a contributing writer for online news magazines such as Salon and Alternet and is a frequent guest on Ring of Fire TV on the Free Speech Network. Chauncey is a product of the Reagan 80’s, a member of the hip hop generation, and lover of all things Star Wars. While in high school, he was once courted by the Right-wing establishment as a model “young black conservative” before realizing that his roots and origins as a member of the black working class precluded such foolishness. Chauncey has been writing online since 2007. All of his detractors he counts as fans. Those detractors include Herman Cain, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the gaggle of white supremacists and other bigots who claim to hate Chauncey but somehow cannot stop emailing him. He is also struggling with an addiction to soda, a personal battle that he documents weekly on his podcast The Chauncey DeVega Show.
David Akadjian
David Akadjian has designed sales, negotiation, and communication training for some of the top companies in the world. He also writes about economics and how to have political conversations with the people you know (without killing yourself). His work has also been featured in The Huffington Post, Alternet, Popular Resistance, TruthOut, Raw Story and The Washington Spectator. The Little Book of Revolution: A Distributive Strategy for Democracy is his first book.