Steve Gilliard - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Steve Gilliard was a freelance journalist and left-wing political blogger who ran the website The News Blog. An outspoken and at times controversial figure, he was an influential voice in the leftwing political blogosphere.

Life and career

Born and raised in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

, Gilliard attended Hunter College Elementary and Hunter College High School

Hunter College High School

Hunter College High School is a New York City secondary school for intellectually gifted students located on Manhattan's Upper East Side. It is administered by Hunter College, a senior college of the City University of New York. Although it is not operated by the New York City Department of...

, laboratory school

Laboratory school

A laboratory school or demonstration school is an elementary or secondary school operated in association with a university, college, or other teacher education institution and used for the training of future teachers, educational experimentation, educational research, and professional...

s for the gifted operated by Hunter College

Hunter College

Hunter College, established in 1870, is a public university and one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York, located on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Hunter grants undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate degrees in more than one hundred fields of study, and is recognized...

. He was a graduate of NYU

New York University

New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...

, where he studied history and journalism. He worked as a freelance writer for various print publications from 1986 to 1992, after which he spent two years on the New Jersey Democratic State Committee

New Jersey Democratic State Committee

The New Jersey Democratic State Committee is the New Jersey state affiliate of the United States Democratic Party.New Jersey Assemblyman John S. Wisniewski is the Chairman and Camden Mayor Dana Redd is the Vice-Chairwoman. They were elected on January 27, 2010.-Party structure:The NJDSC is the...

campaign staff. From 1994 to 1996, Gilliard worked as a researcher, and then returned to writing—this time for the on-line medium—as a freelancer on various projects for the next two years.

In 1998, Gilliard joined the netslaves.com website as featured Web writer and "Media Operative" -- a position he held through 2003. The site chronicled poor business practices and employee conditions in dot-com companies, particularly the Silicon Alley

Silicon Alley

Silicon Alley is a nickname for an area with a concentration of Internet and new media companies in Manhattan, New York City. Originally, the term referred to the cluster of such companies extending from the Flatiron District down to SoHo and TriBeCa along the Broadway corridor, but as the location...

tech companies of New York. Among his more influential columns for the site was the "How to Read a 10Q" series, which took a reader-friendly investigative approach to dissecting SEC

United States Securities and Exchange Commission

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is a federal agency which holds primary responsibility for enforcing the federal securities laws and regulating the securities industry, the nation's stock and options exchanges, and other electronic securities markets in the United States...

-mandated corporate financial and governance reports. Steve also wrote more broadly on topics deemed to be of interest to the NY-based geek, from love issues to how to install a new motherboard.

In 2003, Steve was tasked with contributing to and moderating netslaves.com's online bulletin board, which had grown in usership after instances of homophobia and racism alienated a large group of users from Philip Kaplan

Philip J. Kaplan

Philip J. "Pud" Kaplan is an American entrepreneur and computer programmer who has founded several Internet companies.He created the Fucked Company website in May 2000 and wrote the corresponding book F'd Companies in 2002....

's FuckedCompany.com

Fucked Company

Fucked Company was a website created by Philip J. "Pud" Kaplan as a "dot-com dead pool" which chronicled failing and troubled companies in its unique and abrasive style after the dot com bust in 2000...

. These users flocked to netslaves, but two feuding users (who went by the names Cheopys and Uncle Meat, of left and right political persuasion, respectively) repeatedly created situations in which Steve would have to arbitrate discussions. In June 2004, Steve banned both users, causing a boycott, a massive defection of users, and eventually, the closure of netslaves.com.

After the demise of Netslaves, Gilliard spent several months as a diarist and contributing editor to the Daily Kos

Daily Kos

Daily Kos is an American political blog that publishes news and opinions from a progressive point of view. It functions as a discussion forum and group blog for a variety of netroots activists, whose efforts are primarily directed toward influencing and strengthening the Democratic Party...

site. In August 2003, in addition to occasional contributions to sites such as The Huffington Post

The Huffington Post

The Huffington Post is an American news website and content-aggregating blog founded by Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer, and Jonah Peretti, featuring liberal minded columnists and various news sources. The site offers coverage of politics, theology, media, business, entertainment, living, style,...

, he began his own independent site. Gilliard was the primary writer and operator of The News Blog, which he maintained until his hospitalization and subsequent death in June 2007.

Gilliard died on June 2, 2007 at age forty-two, following a series of heart and kidney problems.

Influence

In a tribute posted on June 3, Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas

Markos Moulitsas Zúniga

Markos Moulitsas Zúniga , often known by his username and former military nickname "Kos" , is the founder and publisher of Daily Kos, a blog focusing on liberal and Democratic Party politics in the United States. He is also a weekly columnist at the Washington, D.C...

wrote about Gilliard's influence on his own site:
Steve Gillard, on his blog, brought frequent attention to the military history concerning previous military interventions in the Middle East, particularly the British Mandate of Mesopotamia in Iraq, and how the British experience was relevant to the current US occupation of Iraq.

Controversy

When Michael S. Steele

Michael S. Steele

Michael Stephen Steele is an American politician who served as the first African-American chairman of the Republican National Committee from January 2009 until January 2011. From 2003 to 2007, he was the seventh Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, the first African American elected to statewide...

announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate election of 2006

United States Senate elections, 2006

Elections for the United States Senate were held on November 7, 2006, with 33 of the 100 seats in the United States Senate being contested. Senators are elected for six-year terms, with one third of the Senate seats up for a vote every two years. The term of office for those elected in 2006 runs...

, Gilliard mocked Steele's perceived subservience to the Republican Party by posting a photoshopped picture of Steele in minstrel

Minstrel show

The minstrel show, or minstrelsy, was an American entertainment consisting of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music, performed by white people in blackface or, especially after the Civil War, black people in blackface....

makeup. This was picked up by Jeff Jacoby, a columnist with the Boston Globe, who was so incensed by Gilliard's comments about Black Americans that he dedicated a column criticizing him in December 2005. Gilliard reproduced the relevant portion of Jacoby's column on his own website, along with a copy of the response he had emailed to Jacoby, in which he said that he and most other blacks held black conservatives

Conservatism

Conservatism is a political and social philosophy that promotes the maintenance of traditional institutions and supports, at the most, minimal and gradual change in society. Some conservatives seek to preserve things as they are, emphasizing stability and continuity, while others oppose modernism...

"in complete and utter contempt".

Earlier in his career, Gilliard was threatened with legal action by representatives of Rosie O'Donnell

Rosie O'Donnell

Roseann "Rosie" O'Donnell is an American stand-up comedian, actress, author and television personality. She has also been a magazine editor and continues to be a celebrity blogger, LGBT rights activist, television producer and collaborative partner in the LGBT family vacation company R Family...

when he "wrote something about Rosie leering at Peta Wilson

Peta Wilson

Peta Gia Wilson is an Australian actress and model. She is best known as Nikita in the television series La Femme Nikita.-Early life:...

, the tall, very blonde, very bosomy star of the La Femme Nikita series." He responded that if sued, he would post the responses to his discovery on Usenet

Usenet

Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...

. Gilliard also crossed swords with Pulitzer-prize winning author Sydney Schanberg

Sydney Schanberg

Sydney Hillel Schanberg is an American journalist who is best known for his coverage of the war in Cambodia.-Life:Schanberg joined The New York Times as a journalist in 1959. He spent much of the early 1970s in Southeast Asia as a correspondent for the Times...

in 2001 when he attacked APBNews.com, Schanberg's employer, for encouraging its writers and editors to work without pay after the site got into financial trouble. Schanberg's response was widely interpreted as an invitation to personal fisticuffs, but the offer was declined.

According to Matt Bai

Matt Bai

Matt Bai writes the “Political Times” column for the New York Times and is a frequent contributor for the Times Magazine, where he covered both the 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns. Bai often explores issues of generational change in American politics and society...

, a political reporter for the New York Times Magazine, "some right-wing bloggers [gloated] over his death" and his burial place is kept confidential to avoid vandalism.

Notable blog postings

Interviews

"Steve Gilliard: Web Writer and Damn' Proud of It" (Netslaves.com, circa 2000)

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.