Seven years ago I signed onto this pre-Scoop newfangled site called Daily Kos. I was already pissed off at the 2000 election results, and even more pissed off at the Iraq War and the credulousness of the media in accepting the excuses Bush was coming up with in terms of why we were going to war there.
Democrats were demoralized and we were wandering the wilderness. I was a proud Democrat from Connecticut, in the days when Joe Lieberman wasn't the embarrassment he is now, and I wanted a place to rant that I hoped would be more effective than yelling at my television. Since all politics is local, and I didn't claim on the ground experience in other parts of the country, I signed on as DemFromCT. It stuck, and that's what I have been ever since.
In those days, you could sign in as anything you wanted and your account wasn't fixed to one name. On occasion, my son would sign on as KidFromCT and ask for help with his math homework (it takes a village) and thus did communities grow...
Flash forward to 2010. Each year I put up around 500 posts here (and many more comments), and I've also co-founded Flu Wiki and posted at the forum there and at other web sites. That flu effort has gotten me invited to work with two cabinet secretaries (Mike Leavitt and Kathleen Sebelius) and with the CDC (as well as various state and local agencies) on communication issues for pandemic planning despite keeping my DemFromCT moniker all these years. My name has been on our about page for around three years, but the feds found me through my demfromct email (judging from comments written here and elsewhere, hardly anyone uses that page.) I've done media panels with journalists and with pollsters and pundits. But we've been in a sort of equilibrium whereby the persona and body of work by DemfromCT is searchable and slightly separate from my every day work, but getting blurrier every day (for example, I'm here as DemFromCT, there as myself - but I'm only there because of here.)
Although library information science folks have always been split on the issue of pseudonyms and the web (this link is from 2005), the recent retirement of my friends and colleagues the reveres at my favorite public health blog Effect Measure brought the question home with this post: Blog matters: who is "revere"?:
If you want evidence of our expertise, there is quite a lot of it available. On the old site over at Blogger there are 1170 blog posts going back to the end of November, 2004. We moved here to Scienceblogs.com on June 9, 2006 and here you can find an additional 2381 posts (not counting this one). Among the comments here (we lost the comments on the Blogger site) you can find us weighing in on many among the 36,985 published so far (more by the time you read this). Are we accurate reporters of the science we talk about? You can judge for yourself, but I can tell you honestly we have had many nice emails from fellow scientists whose work we have taken the time to explain.
I can attest to a robust email correspondence from people whose work we have covered in Abbreviated Pundit and elsewhere. But because I was intrigued by revere's insistence on psudonymity to the end, I thought it would be fun to get the opinion and experience of some of my friends and colleagues, all of whom I have met in real life.
What follows are brief interviews with accomplished writers Mark Blumenthal/Mystery Pollster ( pollster.com , National Journal ), Meteor Blades (Daily Kos), Kagro X (Daily Kos, Congress Matters), digby (Hullabaloo) and Marcy Wheeler/emptywheel (emptywheel at Firedoglake) on the topic of pseudonyms and their own experience and decision-making on choosing to out themselves, more or less, on line. All of my distinguished and talented interviewees were asked the same basic questions: what made you decide to use your real name, and are you sorry or satisfied that you did? Extra questions I threw in are [bracketed].
Added: a response from revere.
My thanks to all who participated.
Interviews below the fold.
Mark Blumenthal/Mystery Pollster:
I should clarify that I never technically blogged anonymously. I remained anonymous -- using the Mystery Pollster pseudonym -- for only about a year as an occasional email correspondent and source for Mickey Kaus' blog on Slate.com starting in August 2003. He had just posted an item on an LA Times poll on the Grey Davis recall special election, and I had some thoughts about the unique polling challenge that for some reason I chose to share via email. He responded within a matter of hours asking if he could quote me. I said yes and awoke the next day surprise to see that he had reproduced a long block quote from my email attributed to "Alert kf reader M--who identifies himself as a 'D.C. based Democratic pollster without clients in California.'" I wouldn't have objected had Kaus wanted to use my real name, but for whatever reason, he chose to keep me anonymous and I didn't complain. The next installment referred to me as "kf mystery pollster 'M'". Eventually he dropped the "M," but the Mystery Pollster pseudonym stuck.
When I started my blog a year later, I thought it made sense to stick with the Mystery Pollster name, but I chose at that point to also use my real name. My then business partners did not object to my blogging, so I saw no upside to remaining anonymous.
Problem was, I didn't put my name in large type at the top of the blog template and as a result a lot of people -- including Kaus at first -- assumed that I had chosen to remain anonymous. In retrospect, the confusion was inevitable given the origin of the pseudonym and the plain meaning of "mystery pollster," but it took me by surprise at the time.
Aside from the unintended confusion at the beginning of the blog, I've never had any second thoughts about any of it. I look back and see the value of my initial anonymity, even if it was just as Kaus' source. My sense is that his readership, which has always included a huge number of influential political journalists, took me seriously in a way they might not have had Kaus initially sourced me as a "pollster Mark Blumenthal." In other words, anonymity meant they could focus on what I was writing without worrying about whether I was anyone they had ever heard of. In that sense the initial anonymity -- even the erroneous presumption by some that I was blogging anonymously -- was a great equalizer.
When I decided to start the blog, I felt that using my real name would make the enterprise more transparent and accountable. Looking back, I have no regrets. Mystery Pollster did more to raise my professional profile than anything else I had done in nearly 20 years of political polling. It has opened doors professionally and personally that I never dreamed of opening. So no, no regrets.
For what it's worth, even though I now blog at Pollster.com, I've never surrendered the Mystery Pollster brand. It is still the name of my National Journal column, and "MysteryPollster" is also my Twitter handle.
Heather Parton/digby, who won the 2004 Koufax award for blog writing, and accepted an award in 2007 in person at the Take Back America conference on behalf of the "Progressive Blogosphere":
[on accepting the award, live]:
When they asked me, I knew if I agreed to do it it would be ridiculous to try to remain anonymous. And I was ready to commit to full-time writing and activism, which meant I was going to have to leave the house.
[on when you use Heather Parton and when digby]:
I use it [Heather Parton] in every way but my writing. I consider "Digby" to be my "stage" name. Like Bono. Or Sting. (Cher?) The funny thing is that a lot of my personal friends now use digby interchangeably with Heather. Even those who've known me for years.
It changed things in some ways, but I suspect it's less because I revealed my name than because I revealed my gender. For better or worse, I don't think I could have progressed as a writer/activist if I hadn't done it, so I don't have second thoughts. I do miss having the mystique though. It was fun.
Tim Lange/Meteor Blades:
Unlike many people who may want to discuss issues - such as having had an abortion or how their employer is a crook - without fear that people they know in meat-world will discover who they actually are, I have no concerns that someone might use my real name to make life difficult for me.
[any regrets?]:
No. Sometimes, however, I almost wish I had used my real name instead of creating a moniker. Now, I am best known by my moniker. When I made a switch at the same time some other Daily Kos Front Pagers did so more than a year ago, I received so many objecting emails that I switched back within two hours. The weird thing was that several people said they actually thought Meteor Blades was my real name.
[on where MB came from]:
After I left the Los Angeles Times, for several years I had a one-man business selling centuries-old Indonesian ceremonial daggers (keris) to private clients. Keris have many legends attached to them. In Bali and other islands of the archipelago, they are passed down within families through the generations. They are said to be magical, able, for instance, to leave their sheaths at night, hunt down and kill the owner's enemies. They are also said to be made from meteor iron. In fact, of course, there are no more meteorites in Indonesia than anywhere else on the planet. And while there have been a few keris made from meteorites, not many are. Nonetheless, I named my little business, Meteor Blades. And that also became my moniker more than seven years ago.
Marcy Wheeler/emptywheel:
My pseudonym was always pretty soft (I blogged at Blogging of the President in 2003-4 under my own name). So it was more akin to Poor Richard, a persona, than a pseudonym for me. I liked it bc it eliminated issues of gender (I was almost universally assumed to be male), Also, I was consulting to Ford at the time, and since Ford is so susceptible to brand pressure, figured it was better to do what I did (which after all had zero to do with Ford) pseudonymously, just to discourage any issues.
I got to a point in 2007 where consulting in the auto industry AND blogging at the same time was unsustainable--I was working in the US rather than Asia, and more specifically working in some conservative parts of the country in dealers which are usually conservative anyway. Once I stopped working in the auto industry it made no difference. Anyway, by that point I was recognizable.
I don't regret losing the pseudonym, though I like that I'm still emptywheel. My academic work included a number of pseudonymous writers--partly because of censorship, partly because they preceded the era of authorial names in newspapers, and partly for the persona. So I'm happy to be both emptywheel and Marcy Wheeler.
David Waldman/Kagro X:
I decided to go with my real name for a few reasons. First, it became obvious that writing under a real name -- or at least a real-sounding name -- made a difference to journalist-types when it came to explicitly crediting ideas they found in the blogosphere. I actually think some of the reasoning for that has the same roots as my own second reason for switching, which is that it can sometimes be just awkward and silly-feeling to have to credit or give a fake-sounding name. It wasn't particularly comfortable to introduce myself in person, on conference calls, or wherever under the fake-sounding name, though it would have been a perfectly easy thing to do if my fake name sounded plausibly real. So if it was silly feeling for me, I can well imagine it felt just as strange for a professional journo to have to figure out how to not look like a crackpot crediting a quote or idea to "a blogger by the name of Kagro X."
I haven't had any real second thoughts about the change, though I'm not always glad I did it. First of all, there were no other Kagro Xs in the world, while there are several David Waldmans, not all of whom are obviously distinguishable from me, and with some of whom I'd prefer not to be confused. Not all of the people who read my writing are happy with the change either, as it turns out. And some are still genuinely confused about what ever happened to Kagro X. But in general, the purpose has been served. Traditional journalist-types have been more willing to quote or credit, and that increases my reach.
I've always wondered whether it might not have been wiser to simply adopt a real-sounding pseudonym, in order to preserve some measure of anonymity (or even just to distinguish myself from the many other David Waldmans) while also making it easy for journos to comfortably borrow anything of value they might find. But there was still one more issue stemming from pseudonymity that couldn't be solved that way, and that's the frequently-made accusation that pseudonymous writers are somehow hiding from accountability, even though a reputation can (and does every day in the mainstream journalism and entertainment worlds) just as easily attach to a pseudonym as it can do a "real" name. Rather than 1) coming up with some new pseudonym, and 2) preparing to defend against later charges that using a real-sounding pseudonym was somehow even MORE deceptive than using an obviously fake one, I just opted to go with the real thing.
Note in Marcy's comments and Heather's experience some gender issues that still surface (this from Joan Walsh in 2007 about digby):
Does it matter that she's a woman? With opinion writing still dominated by men, the answer is a loud yes.
Remember, on the internet, no one knows you're a dog.
Thanks, once again, to all our participants! Pseudonym or not, each has made a unique and irreplaceable contribution to our community.
As for me, I think the content (with links) matters more than the name or the creds. But then again, that's why I blog.