Wit and Verve

Wit and Verve
Having enthusiasm and ability to create artistic compositions is not a talent that every writer or artist possess. Michael De Yoanna, founder and owner of Dscriber.com, has networked a collection of associates who embody this concept hence the mantra ; wit and verve.

Dscriber.com is a news based website similar to the Huffington Post or Gawker with emphasis on fair and accurate reporting while using wit and creative animations.

Writers from around the world like Chad Diprince from The Denver Post, or Bob Eckstein editor of The Basement contribute to the site.

While colorful and established artists like Liza Donnelly a cartoonist from The New Yorker bring the sections of the site to life with witty and thought provocation cartoons.

De Yoanna said of the Rocky Mountain Newspaper closing in 2009, “It was a wake up call… journalism was changing very fast.”

De Yoanna, a graduate from both Metro State College and the University of Colorado, has worked on the site while maintaining a part-time position with 5280 and freelancing for several other publications. The site utilizes the latest technology and online readership to drive traffic while aggregating information from other news reports in an open and objective perspective.

De Yoanna spent his time completing his master degree program as the Editor in Chief of the Advocate for UCD. After graduating he spent time working for the Colorado Daily and several other Front Range publications with the intentions of working for the Rocky Mountain News or the AP Press.

He continued to freelance for several publications like The Colorado Independent, Boulder Weekly, Rocky Mountain Chronicle and The Washington Post.

De Yoanna advised a journalism class at Metro State on Wednesday saying, “My part-time job with 5280 allows me to do all the other things I want to do.”

De Yoanna’s passion for representing professional journalism in creative way while adapting to the changing landscape lead to his endeavor with Dscriber.com, a site that is currently having 100,000 visitors a month.

“We model our format after a ‘Harper’s Weekly’ approach as opposed to ‘Huffington Post’,” De Yoanna Said.

De Yoanna went on to explain how aggregating news and re-writing it has taken the online readership by storm, “The owner of Huffington (Post), Nick Denton, recently said ‘aggregate or die’, a concept I don’t necessarily agree with.”

De Yoanna expressed his stern dismay for sites like Examiner.com that base their content solely on what is trending and flood the market of readership with too much content saying, “it is killing journalism, just killing it… our goal is to become a news organization that puts up news that matters.”

He also expressed that working first hand with citizen journalist has only proved to him that there is a vital need for professional journalist to create reliable news.

Leaving the class with one final statement about the ever converging media of news coverage De Yoanna said, “the internet requires us (journalist) to be multi-faceted.”