Company Overview

For as far back as the founders of The Daily Acts can recall, when it comes to presidential politics one consistent gripe has united liberals, conservatives, and moderates, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, those who vote regularly and those with only a casual interest in our political process: the media. The media picks the frontrunners. The media decides what issues we're going to talk about. The media decides which scandals to play down and which non-scandals to play up. The media picks which sound bites to print and to broadcast to the public.

The media.

The media.

The media.

But things are different now. As the mainstream media continues to lose its influence on the political process, it has grown shriller, more ideological, and more agenda-driven. The result? Continued loss of credibility. And then, as The Economist has reported in the context of newspapers, it just begins to die.

What replaces it? Well, blogs have made tremendous strides toward democratizing the news media. YouTube and its video-sharing clones became vehicles for political campaigns to drive messages (negative or positive) almost since their inceptions. Everyone and his sister is trying to crack the social networking code. Podcasting is the new talk radio.

And yet, the vast majority of the valuable information distributed digitally across the Web through these new media falls on the "comment" side of "news & comment."

William Kristol once asked in a Weekly Standard editorial, "In sum, we need, and deserve, a great daily newspaper. That paper would be careful and truthful, lively and unpompous, confident and not smug--and, of course, fair, balanced, and unafraid. Who will found it?" The Daily Acts is our attempt to answer that question with a collaborative, online news source produced by its own consumers. Our focus is the 2008 campaign for president. Everyone is a reporter. The only rule is that what you contribute must be true and verifiable. Original reporting is best. But stories that fill in facts left out by the agenda-driven MSM are welcome, too. We draw our moniker from the first "newspapers" on record, the Acta Diurna, or Daily Acts, which were published records of Roman official notices, often carved into stone or metal and displayed for all to see. We draw our name and motivation from antiquity because, like them, we don't know what this public sharing of information will yield. It will mold itself and reshape itself and take on a life of its own, we suspect. We never want any American to feel as though an agenda-driven media corps has muted his voice ... because every American is the media. The Daily Acts is a Virginia limited liability company.

DISCLAIMERS

The Daily Acts is an online, user-generated citizen journalism site. We are a voluntary association of individuals covering the news of the day as it relates to the 2008 campaign for President of the United States. The structure of the project allows anyone with an Internet connection to be a journalist.

The Daily Acts cannot guarantee the validity of the information found here; no more so than, say, CBS News can guarantee the validity of the infamous memo of the 2004 presidential campaign. Our editors are instructed to weed out obvious fabulists and reject unsupported sensationalism. Before submitting news content, citizen journalists commit to the authenticity of the information in their stories. They are also encouraged to upload video, audio, or images from reported events and other primary source material to support the validity of their reporting. We take every step to protect the reputations of public officials and private citizens against false and misleading information.

The Daily Acts publishes news, not opinion. We don't seek to enter the daily scrum of political commentary. The fully formed community of political bloggers handles that quite well, we believe. Instead, we encourage our citizen journalists to cover news on the campaign trail-news the Old Media refuses to cover or covers through the lens of its well-publicized biases. Our editors are instructed to send opinion pieces back to the submitting journalist for revisions or they reject them outright. But as long as the stories that are submitted are fact-based news, we don't care who the person doing the reporting is-we enthusiastically welcome supporters of the various campaigns to submit appropriate news content.

Citizen journalists for The Daily Acts write on spec. They are invited to insert their own Google Ad codes into their posts to receive revenues based on readership generation. We are presently developing a plan for greater revenue sharing with our citizen journalists.

Most important, our editors and journalists are volunteers. We fully expect mistakes will be made.