Volunteer mush

When I found myself (through no fault of mine, the gentlemen who released me and two dozen others assured me) with time and talent to spare, I turned to a newish organization called Volunteer Match to help me dispose of said time and talent. Having made a commitment to the nonprofit industry by obtaining a master's in nonprofit management and finding paid work in the field, first at an arts center and then at a health charity, I can't very well turn up my nose at volunteering. This is my chance to "give back," as the saying goes, "to the community."

I found half a dozen opportunities that seemed interesting and wrote to each organization via the Volunteer Match contact form. Some never responded. One responded so quickly and enthusiastically, expressing such confidence in me based on my online portfolio, that I began working for them literally within minutes.

The oddest reply came from a group that I just don't know how to assess: Daily Source. There's no doubt I can help them: they need news judgment and editing skills to put together a daily feed of articles from various online sources, and these are skills I have been using my entire career. In a series of follow-up questions, however, I got the sense they were more interested in the degree to which I agreed with their philosophy than in my availability and expertise.

After a few days of back-and-forth I called a timeout and wrote to the volunteer recruiter:

I've been trying to figure out what makes Daily Source different/better than any of the very many other aggregators out there, and I'm not seeing it. Since you do no original reporting, I am having an especially hard time understanding what makes Daily Source a charity worth supporting with money or donated labor. What am I missing?

Certainly Daily Source's mission statement -- "Bringing high quality news and information from across the Internet to the public 24 hours a day, 365 days a year in order to educate the public and improve our world" -- offers no hint of different-ness or better-ness. But the recruiter didn't answer my questions, so I instead posed them to Daily Source founder and executive director Peter Dunn, who, three days later, has yet to reply.

I was particularly intrigued by a page called How We Choose Articles, which offers a critique of the mainstream media that verges on paranoia (and which is therefore mainstream for the Internet) but goes a step beyond, by asserting that articles on DailySource.org are more fair, more accurate and more compelling than what the mainstream media produces. Since Daily Source plays no role in assigning, reporting or editing the material it publishes, I just don't see how that figures.

The page says in part, "We seek articles that have accurate information and are closest to the known truth." I can't get the phrase "closest to the known truth" out of my head. Daily Source is staffed by people with impressive journalism résumés -- these days, finding people who used to have great media jobs isn't that hard -- but this simply is not something I can imagine coming out of the mouth of any journalist I have ever met. It strikes me as a form of orthodoxy that disallows the possibility of dissent or even novelty.

What really really concerns me is the possibility that Daily Source is merely a clever way of generating salaries for the site's paid staff by exploiting donors and under-employed editors who think they're helping create the future of journalism. If Daily Source is a scam, I suppose it's a modest one: Dunn told the IRS he received $54,103 in salary and benefits from The Daily Source Limited in 2007; and he has loaned the organization almost as much as he has earned, in effect funding much of his own salary without charging any interest in return.

Which seems downright charitable.

Even if I'm wrong to doubt the way Daily Source spends donations, I still don't get it: Why does this organization exist? I am a huge believer in the potential of nonprofit journalism; if any segment of society is going to assign itself the mission of fact-seeking and truth-telling, it's the likes of NPR and ProPublica. A nonprofit aggregator, on the other hand, merely hastens the already hasty demise of the for-profit news sources that have served us more or less competently for more or less a century.