| URL | http://www.aldaily.com/ |
|---|---|
| Slogan | Veritas odit moras ("Truth hates delay")[1] |
| Type of site | Broadsheet-style web portal and aggregator |
| Available language(s) | English |
| Owner | The Chronicle of Higher Education |
| Created by | Denis Dutton |
| Launched | September 28, 1998[2] |
| Alexa rank | 46,513 (as of June 2009) |
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Arts & Letters Daily (www.aldaily.com) is a web portal owned by The Chronicle of Higher Education. It features links to a diverse array of news stories, features and reviews from throughout the online Anglosphere, each introduced with a short blurb or teaser. In this, it has some of the characteristics of a weblog.
Contents |
Content
| “ | "A & LD" does for ideas what the Bloomberg service does for commerce. It watches developments, sorts things out, tells you what you need to know. It doesn't produce the profits Bloomberg brings in, but over time its ability to make connections may turn out to be even more important than the stock market. | ” |
According to founder Denis Dutton, Arts & Letters Daily is a web portal for "the kinds of people who subscribe to the New York Review of Books, who read Salon and Slate and The New Republic — people interested in ideas."[2]
Design
A&L Daily's layout, designed in July 1998 by Dutton[2], "mimics the 18th century English broadsheets and a 19th century copy of a colonial New Zealand periodical, the Lyttelton Times."[4] Three columns of links dominate the site: Articles of Note, Book Reviews, and Essays/Opinions.
Each link is introduced with a 25-word teaser. Examples of teasers include:[citation needed]
- “Before Ritalin, little Tom Bradley set out for his Mormon school each morning, head brimming with amino acids, keen to challenge his teacher’s creationism..."
- “'A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.'” Joseph Stalin was callous, but maybe somehow right..."
- “Anti-poverty advocates point to drug abuse and depression as prime “barriers to work” for welfare moms. And drunken, abusive men?"
- “Science does not follow a clear road to truth; better is the idea of a meandering river in flood and drought..."
- “Oprah Winfrey? Compared to the whining, spoiled, conceited snots of the high-art literary world, she's an exquisite, classy lady..."
- “You’ve taken LSD and are headed for a bad trip. Whose music do you seek as a quick antidote? Mozart or Haydn?..."
To the left of the main columns is a series of links to other online content providers, as well as a section titled “Nota Bene" (the Latin for “mark well"), which is the site's fourth and final collection of daily links to articles deemed to be of particular interest.
History
A&L Daily was preceded by an electronic mailing list discussion group, "Phil-Lit", that served as a continuous internet symposium on articles and reviews found on the web. The list was initiated by Denis Dutton, a native of Los Angeles, California, and a professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, New Zealand. When the list reached eight hundred subscribers, Dutton suggested putting the articles together on a single webpage. Phil-Lit subscribers and Dutton's friends came up with the name "Arts & Letters Daily."[citation needed]
Arts & Letters Daily went online in September 1998.[5]. Dutton was assisted in operating the site by three former Phil-Lit subscribers: Sharon Killgrove of the Mojave Desert; Harrison Solow of Malibu, California; and Kenneth Chen, then a student at University of California, Berkeley.[citation needed] By August 1999, it was attracting 250,000 monthly readers and praise from USA Today, Wired, and The Observer; the latter called it the world's top website, ahead of The New York Times and Amazon.com.[5] The website's relatively high profile at the time led to a "low-level" bidding war among several potential buyers, with the online magazines Feed and Slate competing with The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Lingua Franca[5], with the latter eventually becoming the owner.
By this time it had already spawned a "sister site," SciTechDaily, run by Dutton's friend Vicki Hyde, a science editor and author whose web company hosted both sites. The two also collaborated at this time to launch Dutton's Cybereditions publishing operation, subsequently taken over in 2005 by Hyde's company.[citation needed]
In 2000, Dutton asked Tran Huu Dung, a professor of economics at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, to serve as managing editor of the website. T hough Dutton and Dung had never met, the two had corresponded via e-mail, and Dung's classical liberal weltanschauung was similar to Dutton's.[citation needed]
In April 2002, A&L Daily was awarded a "People's Voice Award" for Best News Website by The Webby Awards. By August, Lingua Franca had declared bankruptcy, and A&L Daily lost its only source of financial support. Dutton and Dung financed the site themselves until October 7, 2002, when A&L Daily went offline. On October 25, 2002, A&L Daily was again online, accompanied by an announcement that The Chronicle of Higher Education had purchased it and "the assets of its parent company, which published the magazine Lingua Franca."[6]
By March 2005 the single-page website was claiming more than 2.5 million page views a month, and about to receive its 100-millionth hit.[4] In August 2007, PC Magazine included it among its list of "Top 100 Classic Web Sites", their "definitive list of the best that the Internet has to offer in 2007."[7] Their review credited the website for "pull[ing] together some of the most interesting reads available on the Web today."[8]
References
- ^ The website points out that "Veritas odit moras" is from line 850 of Seneca the Younger’s version of Oedipus.
- ^ a b c The gleeful contrarian, a November 3, 2000 profile and interview with Denis Dutton by Salon.com
- ^ A buffet sure to leave you hungry: Arts & Letters Daily delivers best ideas at high speeds, a June 26, 2007 column about Arts & Letters Daily by Robert Fulford in The National Post
- ^ a b The thinking person's big hit, a March 7, 2005 profile in The Guardian
- ^ a b c What's the great idea?, an 31 August 1999 article from The Guardian
- ^ Arts & Letters Daily to Resume Publication After Purchase by The Chronicle, an October 25, 2002 article from the website of The Chronicle of Higher Education
- ^ Top 100 Classic Web Sites, from an August 13, 2007 article in PC Magazine
- ^ Top 100 Classic Websites: Arts & Letters Daily, from an August 13, 2007 article in PC Magazine
External links
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