And the annual Netroots Nation convention. A slick, professional effort. Who is behind that? There's no question about it. There's tons of effort in making dkos what it is.
Howard Dean? A consortium of progressive interest groups? George Soros even? It's actually an interesting question. I wonder if kos deals with this in his book. "It Can't Be Just About Us"--Frank Schnittger, ETian Extraordinaire
2008 was a good election year for us electorally, of course, but it was also a good year for this site. We easily broke $1 million in revenues, which have allowed us to do a bunch of cool new things: Professionalize. For a long time, Jeremy the tech dude was my only paid staff. As of now, Daily Kos has a paid staff of eight. SusanG is Executive Editor, BarbinMD is Associate Editor, Kagro is editor of Congress Matters, I have a business manager (Will), Brownsox will be a key part of a new project we'll be launching soon, Hunter is hard at work with DK4, and me and Jeremy round things off. The executive team (me, Susan, and Will) also share a new part-time assistant. On top of it all, Kos Media employees now get full benefits. That may seem trite or trivial for you guys, but for me, it's a huge accomplishments. Benefits are expensive.
Professionalize. For a long time, Jeremy the tech dude was my only paid staff. As of now, Daily Kos has a paid staff of eight. SusanG is Executive Editor, BarbinMD is Associate Editor, Kagro is editor of Congress Matters, I have a business manager (Will), Brownsox will be a key part of a new project we'll be launching soon, Hunter is hard at work with DK4, and me and Jeremy round things off. The executive team (me, Susan, and Will) also share a new part-time assistant. On top of it all, Kos Media employees now get full benefits. That may seem trite or trivial for you guys, but for me, it's a huge accomplishments. Benefits are expensive.
The figure I gave above didn't include such a big staff, maybe two or three including kos himself, but did contain payments on hardware (consider the archiving requirements!), bandwidth (I have no idea how much a T3 connection costs, lets say $2000 monthly and I'll bet my last dollar that's a really low figure), MySQL licensing (we paid $142,000 yearly for two big Oracle installations and of course they're not using the MySQL community edition), attorney's fees (dkos has been to court once already - kos won), and basic but unavoidable incidentals (like a graphic/web designer's bill).
So the figure I gave was for the old dkos, assuming it was watching it's burn rate closely and went lightly on the organizational frills, not the present dkos with the larger staff and I excluded Congress Matters entirely.
Let us as well consider just one item where ET would differ greatly from dkos: legal fees. Assuming ET is deliberately EU-wide, across countries whose slander and libel laws differ, ET might require some legal expertise that dkos did not. "It Can't Be Just About Us"--Frank Schnittger, ETian Extraordinaire
There was also an amazing court sentence last year in Modica that ruled blogs are the equivalent of newpapers and are therefore accountable as is a newspaper.It was a very adroit sentence since it did in no way affront what was actually produced on the blog- dossiers and documents alleging corruption and mafia ties- but seized and blacked out the site on purely normative grounds. The site- like all blogs- had not been duly registered as a news source. The case, I hope, should go to Europe.
Off the top of my head, there are a couple cases I've read about:
Verdammte scheisse! It's all too much for a layman! As I said before, operating a blog and contributing to one is worth thinking hard about. "It Can't Be Just About Us"--Frank Schnittger, ETian Extraordinaire
