Halloween night, downtown Washington, D.C. The corner of F Street and 7th is a freak show – 10,000 people just let out of a rock concert. There’s a girl dressed up as Laura Croft from Tomb Raider, with the outfit, physique, and handguns to back it up. There’s a wild-eyed guy sitting on a bucket kicking out Beastie Boy beats on a crappy-looking drum kit with a crowd of eager kids egging him on. A guy dressed up as Where’s Waldo; lots of fishnet stockings; a pair of women posing for a picture on the back a cop’s motorcycle in the middle of the intersection.
An hour earlier, inside the Verizon Center, confetti bats had dropped from the ceiling while Coldplay blasted away on stage.
Like most things in life, good and bad, The Dagger started off innocently enough.
On September 7, 2007, the first introductory story, a two-paragraph piece aptly titled “Introductions,” was posted onto the Internet. Despite being called an introduction, the story posed more questions than it answered.
Today, September 7, 2008, we hope to finally answer some of those lingering questions as we celebrate The Dagger’s anniversary with some laughter, some tears and enough behind-the-scenes details to hopefully keep us relevant for another year.
Lately, I’ve stopped turning down the chance to do something new just because I might look foolish. It’s not that the odds of embarrassing myself have diminished; I’m as capable as ever in that department. But now that I’ve hit middle age, I’ve realized opportunities might not come around again. Plus, embarrassment isn’t fatal. Otherwise, I certainly wouldn’t have made it to middle age in the first place.
I’m no computer wiz, that is for sure, but it seems to me that the Dagger just gets better looking with age. I mean, the content is awesome, don’t get me wrong. But the tools- the map, the events, to name a few- just keep evolving. Every day when I get my email about a new post, it seems I notice something new and different. Down the road I see visions of Dagger being a one-stop-shop for Harford County and I’m damn glad to be a part of it.
The Dagger marks its first anniversary this week. A year that has seen the birth of the future of news and entertainment reporting in this area. No, The Dagger is not the first site of its kind. The Huffington Post comes to mind, as well as others, but it is the first site based in Harford County, that I’m aware of, that continues to inform and entertain. Inform and entertain literally by the hour and sometimes by the minute!
My first exposure to the Dagger came as the Aberdeen elections were heating up this time last year. Watching the back and forth between the candidates and the comments by those same candidates and the readers made for interesting reading. I think we’re all a bit of a voyeur and watching the exchange made for great reading. But it was the power of the Web, the interaction of the readers and ...Continue Reading
Well, that’s not exactly true. You see, I had just started a local cutting edge blog that allowed visitors to debate. Sound familiar? Anyway, a few emails were exchanged between Brian and myself, and I was told The Dagger was founded by a few ex-Aegis reporters. So offered a challenge. I was going to write an article on my site explaining why I thought newspapers should get out of the business of charging for their content online, as our local county newspapers did. The Dagger would host the counterpoint.
It’s rare these days to be in on a grand idea, an idea that for a short time is so free of the daily round of human nonsense that you are almost short of breath.
The idea was that a crew of mostly ex-newspaper writers could remake American Journalism the right way, the way that we thought we hadn’t been allowed to in our short years covering…, well covering.
Last Christmas I mailed a good friend of mine, an editor at the Aegis and Record newspapers, a gift. He mailed it back, unopened, with a curt note attached.
Maybe this was to be expected. About a month-and-a-half earlier, we’d allowed some local businesspeople to run an ad for The Dagger in The Record newspaper – a rude, punkish shot across the bow from a news upstart to the local established media. And, we’d written a story based on court documents suggesting that someone at The Aegis may have given favorable ad rates to a political group. The story was, without a doubt, speculative; but it was far milder than some of the despotic opinion-making I’d seen go on in my time at the paper.
It started about four or five years ago. We were local journalists and photographers hanging around during the lunch hour while our editors quibbled over details and brainstormed our next adventures in the meeting room. I think we were all becoming disenchanted with how things were done because we began talking about how things could be done. We were young and starry-eyed with a lot of fresh ideas, and we joked about starting our own newspaper business.
When I was first approached about joining up with The Dagger, it was before it even existed. I attended a get together/outdoor movie night at Brian’s and ended up indoors most of the time chatting with Brian and Matt about this odd idea for an indescribable website. They asked if I wanted to join up and I agreed. Although now I can say I said yes thinking one of two things would happen: 1.) they would never even start the site; and 2.) if the site were started, I wouldn’t write anyway because I am too lazy.
