With the Christmas and New Year holidays receding fast into the distance, it's always nice to get a small after-season present. We just got one from the Columbia Journalism Review, considered the standard-bearer of news about the news business.
CJR has picked DoD Buzz and only two other online news sites to feature in its foreign affairs section of a new database it is building to provide journalists and the general public with online resources about reputable online news sources. We are featured along with our friends at Small Wars Journal and a news site called GlobalPost.
Here's the nub of what CJR has to say about us:
"Like so many web publications, DoDB is a hybrid of old and new journalistic practices. Clark writes original, well-sourced stories about topics such as the ongoing debate over funding for the second engine on the joint strike fighter, but gives his run-downs with quirky, jargon filled headlines like 'Omnibus NDAA CR F136 - Sing It!...'
"It seems inevitable that the DoD Buzz model of a low-overhead news site with a blue-chip audience will be replicated elsewhere, and even more inevitable that many of those sites will be found somewhat lacking (not many reporters could cover Congress, spy satellites, weapons systems, and have final responsibility for their content, after all). The experiment very much worked out this time, however. 'As far as I know, we’re the first online defense news website that was primarily built for reporting the news to come into creation and survive,' Clark says. 'We’re thriving, actually.'”
We love being grouped with a band of brothers as bright as the folks at Small Wars Journal.
