History
Arts & Letters Daily originated from a mailing list created by Denis Dutton, "Phil-Lit", which served as a symposium on articles and reviews found on the web. When the list reached eight hundred subscribers, Dutton suggested that the articles be put together on a single webpage.
Arts & Letters Daily went online in September 1998. Dutton was assisted in operating the site by three former Phil-Lit subscribers: Sharon Killgrove of the Mojave Desert; Harrison Solow of Malibu, California; and Kenneth Chen, then a student at University of California, Berkeley. Still in 1998, A&L Daily spawned a "sister site," SciTechDaily, run by Dutton's friend Vicki Hyde, a science editor and author whose web company hosted both sites.
By August 1999, A&L Daily was attracting 250,000 monthly readers and praise from USA Today, Wired, and The Observer; the latter called it the world's top website, ahead of The New York Times and Amazon.com. The site's high profile led to a bidding war among several potential buyers, in which the online magazines Feed and Slate competed with The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Lingua Franca. Lingua Franca eventually became the owner.
In 2000, Dutton asked Tran Huu Dung, a professor of economics at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, to serve as managing editor of the website. Though Dutton and Dung had never met, the two had corresponded via e-mail.
In April 2002, A&L Daily was awarded a "People's Voice Award" for Best News Website by The Webby Awards. By August, Lingua Franca had declared bankruptcy, and A&L Daily lost its only source of financial support. Dutton and Dung financed the site themselves until October 7, 2002, when A&L Daily went offline. On October 25, 2002, A&L Daily was again online, accompanied by an announcement that The Chronicle of Higher Education had purchased it along with "the assets of its parent company, which published the magazine Lingua Franca."
A&L Daily sent "tens of thousands of new readers to articles whose readership might otherwise be painfully small." By March 2005, the site attracted more than 2.5 million page views a month and was about to receive its 100-millionth impression. In August 2007, PC Magazine included it among its list of "Top 100 Classic Web Sites", crediting the site for "pull together some of the most interesting reads available on the Web today."
Editor Denis Dutton died on December 28, 2010. As of this date, Evan Goldstein of The Chronicle and Mr. Dutton’s longtime collaborator, Tran Huu Dung, a professor of economics at Wright State University, will continue to produce the site.
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