As the once venerable daily newspaper dies a slow an painful death, what will take its place? There is no need to lament the failure of corporations to run profitable news rooms in the digital age, but what about the role of the free press as a democratic institution?
With this crisis in news comes an opportunity to return to a more populist model of journalism as a voice for the public interest. The Fourth Estate will not die; it will become a more powerful voice for the people.
We’re working on it… stay tuned.
The New Deal
New Deal Media was founded to put the power of the press back into the hands of the people. While we’re working behind the scenes, we’re giving away Internet publishing to individuals and groups working for the greater common good.
Clients pay for their domain(s) (currently $15 per domain per year), and we take care of the rest.
Currently, publishing is by invitation only. For more information, please send e-mail to steve <at> rawley <dot> org.
Services
Our front-to-back services include:
- Web site planning and consulting,
- domain registration,
- DNS configuration,
- configuration of up to five POP3 or IMAP e-mail accounts on your domain (user@yourdomain.tld) and unlimited e-mail forwarding,
- Web site set-up, layout and rudimentary graphic design (we’re happy to work with your graphic artist),
- copy writing and editing assistance,
- training and documentation to help clients with limited technical skills manage their own sites with easy-to-use tools,
- search engine optimization (SEO) to help drive traffic to your site,
- and transparent back-end administration, including nightly backups, software updates and statistics monitoring.
What’s the catch?
Hey, you get what you pay for! No seriously, it’s a hell of a deal, but you don’t get:
- a redundant connection to the Internet (our connection goes down, your site goes down)
- a whole ton of bandwidth (your site gets crazy international, you start paying for bandwidth)
- backup power generation (PGE blows a circuit, your site goes down)
For the nerds
Our servers run 100% free, open source software, and are powered by wind energy (at least that’s what PGE tells us).
We’re a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)/WordPress (MU) shop. Our software stack includes the GNU/Linux operating system and tools (openSUSE and Debian distributions), the Apache Web server with PHP, the MySQL database, and the WordPress/WordPress MU publishing platform. We’ve also run or messed around with phpBB, Plone, Confluence, and Drupal. We can hack C/C++, Java, Smalltalk, Perl, PHP, Bash, etc., not to mention CSS, JavaScript, XHTML, etc., so there’s not much in these software packages that we can’t fix, modify or extend to suit our clients’ needs.
We do not test on animals. In fact, we barely test at all. If you find something broken, let us know, and we’ll see about fixing it.