Bloomberg Businessweek
The Heritage Foundation has plans for a news site with a clean design and straight reporting, Joshua Green reported Thursday in Bloomberg Businessweek. Daily Signal launches June 3, Green wrote, and the site will also offer an opinion section. The staff of about 12 will write about what the mainstream media ignores, Green reported.
The Daily Signal’s clean design, mobile-first approach, and claim of journalistic dispassion suggest obvious similarities to Ezra Klein’s new site, Vox, and Nate Silver’s refurbished fivethirtyeight.com. “Like Vox and 538, we’re purposely branding ourselves not as a blog but a standalone site,” says Robert Bluey, who directs Heritage’s Center for Media and Public Policy and will be the Signal’s editor-in-chief. But Lysaught is leery of the comparison. “What Ezra is doing has got a wild liberal bias to it,” he says. “When we talk about the news, we’re just laying out the facts. We think that’s an important educational mission.”
Journalists with Daily Signal won’t be lazy, Geoffrey Lysaught, the new site’s publisher and Heritage’s vice president of communications, told Green.
“When they get up in the morning, they’re looking for what’s already working. I think they’ll look to us. We want to be the place where the news gets its news, drive that news narrative by identifying real stories, doing the homework, and let those guys run with the work we’ve already done.”
