The Daily Weekly [interest check, brainstorm, recruitment]

[Nahash]

The idea: A periodical IC ‘newspaper’ (if there is interest and initiative we could produce IC ‘articles’, but otherwise this is a secondary thing to the main purpose) which exists as an information broker for the heroes and villains of Valucre ala the Daily Days in Baccano! (for those who have seen it) – for a price and a traded piece of information, the organization will answer questions and provide information on people, organizations, places, events, rumors, speculation, and reality.

Of course, in order to avoid metagaming this organization will have to have eyes and ears investigating what’s happening in different threads. Ideally you will either be on location to witness the events themselves but in lieu of this we would post ‘investigation’ threads in which clues would be followed and conclusions would be drawn. The crucial part about this kind of thread would be to use details mentioned in the original thread in question to lend credibility to whatever information is acquired.

Now, due to its nature this organization requires multiple people to cover all of the investigating necessary to run a proper information brokerage. If we are to gain a good reputation as an information source we must please customers by providing information which is as accurate and complete as possible (WITHOUT Metagaming), this means we need investigators/reporters/field workers to collect this info and to make deals in which information is traded such that our stockpile of info grows and stays current. Some assignments will involve finding out as much as possible about major figures political, criminal, martial, or heroic, and others will involve learning about different events that have taken place (ideally, focusing on more major events). The other job for employees would be to scout/advertise to potential clients such that we could come to an arrangement about information exchanges.

Employees should avoid a fight as much as possible as our organization will endeavor to remain neutral in all disputes and as such its employees must be able to remain disinterested observers as much as possible whether for bad or for good. However, employees must recognize that conflict can always arise and prepare themselves for with this in mind. This job is not for the faint of heart – the business of information is a dangerous game, stealth can be the difference between life and death, and critical thinking is paramount. Whatever the situation requires, the agents of this organization must be prepared. Stealth when remaining undetected is paramount, tact when handling especially sensitive information, and the ability to work without direct supervision.

If you are interested, let me know. If you have any ideas, let me know. I definitely won't be able to run this by myself so I'll need all the help I can get.

The things that I haven't decided yet:

the name: so far the choices are The Daily Weekly and The Tomorrow (Credit: Dodgen), but I’m open to suggestions.

the where: where will this organization be based... i'm inclined towards Terrenus since that's where my one currently active character is presently - but i'm open to where ever. i don't know as much about the setting or lore as older members might but i'm interested in learningggg so hit at me with ideas about where its best to run this little operation

the why: most likely for profit, but there could be more sinister or more heroic reasons if people wanted to take it in that direction.

[supernal]

I love this idea. Speaking of basing this in Terrenus, Terrenus already has a technology in place that will allow for pretty easy dissemination of your articles, newspapers and reports. It's something that's the rough equivalent of television but has a clause built into it for paper media too. It could work very well with your idea. Tell me what you think:

Spoiler:

|How does information disseminate in Terrenus?|

Odin Haze recognized early on in his monarchy that a lack of communication, or miscommunications in general, seemed to be the common ground for most disputes and acted as a serious hindrance to progress. He has made an especial effort to allow rapid dissemination of news and information in of Terrenus. There are newsstands that can be found at nearly any corner, a booth about five times the size of a phone-booth with a medium sized crystal ball at its center.

Stick a piece of parchment under the whirling mass of mist and light and the news is inscribed onto the piece of parchment. The crystal automatically adjusts for the size of parchment, so something the size of a sheet from a notepad will be receive only a list of headlines and a brief, one sentence summary. Something the size of a newspaper gets the full headline. The only attendants are diviners that run maintenance on the crystal ball, attuning it for latency.

Taverns, inns, and cafes have crystal balls large enough to make a man feel like a goldfish inside of one. These crystal balls use photonic grids and holographic arrays to make sense of the storm that brews inside of it. They cover big ticket items in comprehensive detail, with live newscasters to boot, and provide both live and recorded footage in holographic array provided by the satellites.

Town criers have small, rectangular, constantly refreshing pagers and get paged headlines. "Hear ye hear ye! This just in!", and they proceed to tell the character what just got in.

Celebrities: Celebrities in Terrenus are rare, and as most forms of Terrenus government and commerce are a product of a simple meritocracy, it stands to reason that the most famous people are also the most influential. Odin Haze, King of Terrenus and Saint of Gaia, is a household face and name, and right beneath him are the twelve PeaceKeepers.

The PeaceKeepers enjoy what is commonly seen as 'celebrity' status for, as King, the attention Odin Haze gathers is a given. But it is the PeaceKeepers who get requests for written or holo-array photographs. The PeaceKeepers are the ones with fan clubs, and who can't go to a place unaccustomed to them without being bombarded with attention and adoration (a PeaceKeeper's native town is more used to the presence of their PK than another, and might react differently to a lesser seen PK).

[hiss the villain]

You already know I'm down for this.

[Dodgen]

I am interested, and very glad you're being strict about the antimetagaming. So, sign me up boss.

also think it would be quiet hilarious if our newspaper took on a role Similar to The Onion. A Comedic Newspaper to hide the fact that we are information brokers> Yeah? We just need to get some funny people to write for us...So... That could be hard.

[Nahash]

Thanks for the interest,

As of now its looking like the name The Daily Weekly is going to stick. In light of Supernal's comment about Terrenus's news sources this could be an increasingly viable location for the business - who knows maybe we'll get big enough to expand someday. However, I don't want to set the location in stone just yet.

As far as the why, its increasingly seeming like profit will be the best motive and neutrality the best game - otherwise it just wouldn't be fair if one side or another had the privileged support of an information broker.

With that being said, here is some tentative documentation re: The Daily Weekly that I've cooked up. Tell me what you think:

Chain of Command

The president will disseminate assignments, oversee the info provided and work being done, set prices for info and interact with clients to finalize information transfer, and of course go on assignments when it is called for.

The vice-president will share presidential duties, privileges, and authority and will be chosen based on merit as described below.

Editors will be charged with a particular area (group of locations) or (maybe?) a particular hot or important subject to keep track of – all assignments about that area or subject will be forwarded to them, they get first choice of assignments and can distribute other assignments among Investigators as they see fit. Any undistributed assignments are to be posted publically such that any unassigned Investigators can claim them. Editors can also, of course, take on unofficial assignments as they see fit.

Brokers are permitted to buy, sell, and trade information without direct supervision of superiors. This is not a position so much as a category of employees who are granted this privilege. Employees who have shown sufficient loyalty, ability, and judgment will be granted this privilege and exempted from the regulations regarding approval by superiors for any information transaction.

Investigators report to the editors, president, and vice-president regarding official assignments and are asked to spend unassigned time gathering information as they see fit. All employees will begin as investigators and receive promotions based on their relative merit.

Merit will be determined based on consistency, as well as the number and value of contributions in segments of as yet undetermined intervals of time (any suggestions for a good benchmark?). This will be measured based on information provided, threads attended, and investigation threads completed in addition to subjective categories such as creativity, promptness, reliability, and the difficulty or danger of their given assignments). These criterion mean that employees who perform more investigations without being officially assigned to carry them out will receive priority over employees who simply do as they are assigned and nothing more.

Code of Conduct

The Daily Weekly demands certain standards of all its employees:

• ALWAYS complete your assignments in a timely fashion OR inform a superior of your inability to do so in order that another employee can be placed. As long as advance notice is given, no reprimand will be meted out.
• ALWAYS check your facts and provide documentation or other proof of your information.
• NEVER knowingly submit false reports; anyone caught doing so will be terminated.
• NEVER provide information services without consulting with a superior first, and specifically do not provide information without receiving compensation prior to disclosure.
• NEVER provide classified information without the consent of a superior.
• NEVER involve yourself in circumstances you have been asked to report on, all employees of the Daily Weekly are asked to maintain a level of neutrality regarding their assignments and anyone caught violating this neutrality will be either severely reprimanded, suspended, or possibly terminated depending on the seriousness and precedence of the infraction. This rule ONLY applies to employees on official assignments, if we have not asked you to be there than you may exercise your own personal judgment. If this is the case you MAY NOT represent yourself as an employee of the Daily Weekly or in any way imply that the Daily Weekly has endorsed your actions - misrepresentation in these cases will be heavily sanctioned. In some circumstances, The Daily Weekly understands that its employees may be accosted and drawn into situations they would rather keep out of – in these cases self-defense is, of course, permitted. The primary goal in such circumstances should be self-preservation rather than victory, and fights should be avoided as much as possible.
• NEVER knowingly commit a criminal act while on an assignment for the Daily Weekly. If an incident is brought to our attention we will be forced to take disciplinary action. The Daily Weekly will make no efforts to actively track its employee’s criminal activities but we ask that you exercise the utmost discretion if any activity in which you engage contains potentially illegal components.

Clarifications:

Spoiler:

Reprimand = ic docking of pay or position
Suspension = a period of time in which no required assignments will be given (that doesn’t stop people from taking their own initiative)

Independent Operation

While the Daily Weekly cannot be supervise or assign every potential opportunity to gather information, much of its resources will come from serendipitous or simply incidental circumstances of its employees – if you choose to operate independently the degree of scrutiny to which your information will be held won’t be as strict. This leniency is in place to facilitate greater information gathering as well as to clarify the difference between official assignments and unofficial operation. Even if you are not performing duties sanctioned by the Daily Weekly, information you acquire is still useful to the company and as such there are no penalties for acquiring information on your own time and in your own ways. In fact, performing independent investigations or simply reporting on events you participate in is a great way to fast track yourself to a promotion.

---

Anything missing from this documentation? Comments? Questions? Too strict? Too complicated? Too dense? Just right? All of this is primarily just me pooping out ideas in an attempt to cover any eventuality and establish a system for the group to run smoothly with or without direct supervision.

A few more things I plan to write out but haven’t gotten around to yet: guides for writing ‘investigation’ threads AFTER an event has taken place, for writing IC articles about events (if there is interest in producing these), and for how to comport oneself as an employee in threads taking place during the important events in question. If anyone can think of any other information/guides/lists that might be useful let me know and I’ll see about putting something together.

I also need to work out the best way to organize how clients could contact the Daily Weekly to set up an information transaction/meeting/arrangement/etc. Suggestions are welcome.

I am also thinking that it might be useful to create a group for the Daily Weekly (is this free/available to anyone? Does it cost ValBullion?) to house our employee registry (the people in the group), incident reports (information about important events), biographical reports (information about notable/significant/powerful people), organizational dossiers (information about notable clans, guilds, groups, organizations, and businesses), location profiles (notable info about specific locations), and assignment listings.

[AmazonMonk]

Taverns, inns, and cafes have crystal balls large enough to make a man feel like a goldfish inside of one. These crystal balls use photonic grids and holographic arrays to make sense of the storm that brews inside of it. They cover big ticket items in comprehensive detail, with live newscasters to boot, and provide both live and recorded footage in holographic array provided by the satellites.

That seems really interesting... so I have a QQ: Say an RP is taking place in a tavern. A player decides his character wants to "check the news" by checking a crystal ball. Could the player, OOC, call a reporter/writer of the news to write (or copypasta) the "current events" for the following post in the RP? (And probably solely for the following post, unless they decide to check "a different story" or "article")

Or would it be more recommended that the players involved in the RP look up the news themselves and paste it (probably in a [box]) within their own post?

I suppose it could vary depending on the pace and story, but... it seems like it can add a very interesting dynamic. Perhaps especially for quests

[supernal]

That seems really interesting... so I have a QQ: Say an RP is taking place in a tavern. A player decides his character wants to "check the news" by checking a crystal ball. Could the player, OOC, call a reporter/writer of the news to write (or copypasta) the "current events" for the following post in the RP? (And probably solely for the following post, unless they decide to check "a different story" or "article")

Or would it be more recommended that the players involved in the RP look up the news themselves and paste it (probably in a [box]) within their own post?

I suppose it could vary depending on the pace and story, but... it seems like it can add a very interesting dynamic. Perhaps especially for quests

They could do either one. Or if you happen to think of a third or fourth way to use the idea, they can probably do that too.

[supernal]

Double post.

I think the Daily Weekly should provide a two-fold service. One, that they become the main source of public information. Like how in old-timey movies there would be those kids on the street corner with a bucket shouting to hear all about it? That should be the Daily Weekly, and we could definitely produce IC articles acting as summary of events for those thread, as the IC world sees it.

So for example, a terrorist group might do a 3 pager about blowing up a specific building or something. They submit to canonicity which requires one or two summary of events, but those are summaries of the thread in total, and would contain information that we, as simple citizens, might not know. The OOC info might be that they're actually agents from another nation or whatever, but the IC info would be "oohhh scary terrorists".

This would be in addition to providing information for a price. More specific or valuable information than the public would ever get, and that be your main source of income.

My take on one thing is that you don't make it based on a period of time but on a number of articles submitted. Doing it per article would be just like making it commission based or something. I could also set up something in the incentive program so people get a certain amount of VB (to be discussed) per article and the bank can foot the bill instead of the players. This would only apply to the public info and not the information you'd be selling to clients. We can talk about this if you want.

And to answer your question, you can make a Social Group free of charge, and house everything you're talking about. One thing to note is that posts in Groups don't affect your post count at all, much less your experience points (since it's not an IC area). You can get a sub-board, which would increment the post counts and get you points, but that costs VB to get and at this point I think is unnnecessary.

[Nahash]

My take on one thing is that you don't make it based on a period of time but on a number of articles submitted. Doing it per article would be just like making it commission based or something. I could also set up something in the incentive program so people get a certain amount of VB (to be discussed) per article and the bank can foot the bill instead of the players. This would only apply to the public info and not the information you'd be selling to clients. We can talk about this if you want.

I think that our sentiments are very closely aligned - I think that the commission based submission defs works, however, the only reason I added a metric for timeliness has to do with the actual promotion process for employees, people should still be rewarded based on how much they submit buuuuut also I wouldn't want someone to become vice-president because they spent two weeks writing up every existing thread in a given area and then never provided another piece of info again. They may well rocket to the top of the total number of stuff submitted (and potentially get incentive rewards for it if we decide that is a way to go), but if they don't do so consistently then they probably don't deserve a promotion. Obviously once someone is promoted the standards required for them to keep their job would probably be lower. I designed the system such that it can function without editors or a vice-president precisely for this eventuality - having them would make my job easier but they are not essential to keep the group running.

With regards to the ic news articles and adding them into the incentive program, I think it could work great to get people involved. I also think it would be pretty easy to allow any player who wanted to write up an ic article as anyone who wasn't 'officially' part of the daily weekly would get a 'guest columnist' byline or something like that. Submissions from non-daily weekly folks could be a good recruiting tool as well.

I don't think that a whole sub-board is necessary either - I was just thinking that a group could be an easy way to store all of the information we've collected for easy reference (obviously it would have to be private/moderated so that people actually have a reason to compensate us for our info).

More documentation:

Style and Content Guide for IC articles

Format:

Spoiler:

Headline – short title, gives readers the general idea of the subject
Sub-heading – one sentence (5-7 words) summary or hook
Byline – by xxx, include your name and applicable title or position

article text – the who, what, when, why and how of the report, minimum 100 and maximum 250 words

Source: xxx link to the thread(s) in question

---

This is what 250 words looks like:

Spoiler:

two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty

two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred

and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two

hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty

two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty two hundred

Guidelines:

Spoiler:

Consistency: avoid contradictions and follow established conventions for abbreviations, acronyms, shortened names, and titles, etc (right now there aren’t any of these specific to the setting, but as they get created precedent should be followed)
Clarity: avoid vagueness, and prioritize specificity over generality
Accuracy: cite your sources, and quote accurately with proper quotation format (quotation marks and citation), do not pass off opinion for fact
Brevity: avoid excessive wordiness and complicated diction

Sample Article:

Spoiler:

MASSACRE at La Belle Péchés
Bloodshed dampens the mood at popular Tia club.
By anonymous, guest columnist

The clientele at a popular new club in Tia brought the club some unwanted attention recently when an unknown number of assailants accosted one of the dancers and then proceeded to maim or kill a large number of the club’s guests. Police sources say that Tia law enforcement was unable to stop the unprecedented attack in time to save any of the accosted customers. Sources refused comment as to who was responsible, citing the ongoing investigation as ‘sensitive’. Despite the violence of the crimes, no damage was reported to the club itself, leading to speculation that the club itself was not the target of the attack.

The owner of the club declined comment. No further details are available at this time, until the official investigation is closed.

Source: Révolution de la mort [the club in the thread was unnamed, so I chose the only club listed in the locales thread]

[Dodgen]

Easily understood. However i am lacking any characters, outside of Atland, who would be interested in working in such an operation. So if you would like me to put up some work here i am willing to help. I could always make a sneak type to show intrigue and involve himself in other threads.

[supernal]

Nahash hasn't been here in just under a month. I'm going to send him an email drawing his attention to the thread, but I doubt that he'll respond and even if he does I doubt that he'll be able to come back and take things over otherwise I'm sure he would have done so already, as his perception of Valucre is very positive.

That said, I want to hijack this idea and put it into capable hands. I'm looking for a minimum of one, and a maximum of three, members that are interested in taking this idea and running with it. I think that all of the points discussed above have merit and should be taken into account and integrated with the idea, but otherwise will allow for complete creative freedom of whatever interested parties come to stake a claim.

Post your interest here, either as wanting to be an owner of the press or just one of the reporters, and we'll see if we can't get this thing started.

[supernal]

Bump because you all suck.

[devinfaye]

I'm interested. I wouldn't be up to the task of management at the moment (Mostly because I don't trust my organization skills quite yet! Hahaha) But I would not mind being a member for reporting. This would give me some oomph to try and get more active. I'm truthfully super eh about joining things mostly because I'm not sure how (More like I don't want to ruin someone's thread) and I believe maybe doing a more neutral observational type of RP would give me the courage to post more often.

As for the "management at the moment" statement, I'm getting some funds this coming week. A lot of my hesitation for everything Valucre related is organization, time, and access to a computer. At least two of those problems should be phasing out so I may feel up to management a bit later.

Either way, management or reporter, I'm psyched to hear back!

Have a good day all!

[supernal]

Bumping this.

As far as I know, aside from myself, devinfaye and hiss the villain are the only other members interested in this idea.

[hiss the villain]

Bumping this.

As far as I know, aside from myself, devinfaye and hiss the villain are the only other members interested in this idea.

On the real, this idea is great. Where is the interest, people?