A couple of months ago, our activism team was Chris Bowers and Rachel Colyer. With the increased importance of our activism effort to the site's success, they were severely overworked. So we decided to hire a junior-level person to help them out.
But we were soon bombarded with dozens of top-level candidates and we had a choice to make. Where we really going to stick with the idea of just hiring a junior person? And given the quality of the applicants, were we really just going to hire a single person?
We ended up answering no and no. So now that they've all started and are settled in, here's the newest additions to our awesome action team:
Sarah Burris
Sarah Burris comes to Daily Kos after heading new media at UNITE HERE as well as an occasional editor for Future Majority. Originally from Oklahoma, she has worked on campaigns in many red states and challenger districts across the country. She also works on viral meme campaigns such as PaulRyanGossling’s tumblr, Class War Kitteh, & #HugAThug & #UnionHugs.
Her writing can be found at RHRealityCheck and here at DailyKos, & previously at Wiretap Magazine, The Nation & Mother Jones while reporting for Rock the Vote’s Rock the Trail. Her work has been featured on Rachel Maddow, Kieth Olbermann, Chris Hayes, Ed Schultz, as well as The Daily Show & Colbert Report. Sarah has worked on campaigns for the last 10 years across the country doing both communications & fundraising.
She lives in Washington DC where she loves to hike through Rock Creek Park, sit on rooftop decks and laugh with friends, and discover beautiful architecture in the city.
Sarah was
diarying at Daily Kos as far back as 2006, so she's a genuine old-timer. She is also quickly establishing herself as the company clown, which is awesome. We can never have enough hilarity at Daily Kos.
Paul Hogarth
Paul Hogarth grew up in Hyde Park on the South Side of Chicago, where he lived down the street from Barack Obama. While attending college at UC Berkeley, he started a "Wellstone for President" website in 1997 to recruit the Senator to run. After graduating, Paul was elected to the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board—and worked at the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, a housing non-profit in San Francisco.
He started reading Daily Kos in 2003, while volunteering on Howard Dean's campaign. After finishing law school in 2006, Paul became the Managing Editor of Beyond Chron—a blog that covers news and politics ignored by the San Francisco Chronicle. He wrote extensively for years about affordable housing, state & local budget battles and the Proposition 8 fight. In 2009 and 2012, he organized campaign volunteers who traveled to Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington to pass marriage for same-sex couples.
Paul was one of the early supporters of the site, but on Daily Kos and in the broader progressive online and offline world. He beats Sarah by a year, writing his
first Daily Kos diary in 2005. He is a rare breed in the world of blogging -- a true extrovert. I blog because it's easier for me than interacting with real human beings. He blogs because he's passionate about change.
Michael Langenmayr
Michael grew up in a working class family in New York's North Country. He was (and still is) a giant nerd with an unhealthy appetite for comic books, especially Chris Claremont-era X-Men stories, and all things Madonna. He studied journalism at St. Michael's College in Vermont and trained dogs for a year after college to help make ends meet.
The Iraq War dragged Michael into politics and the Howard Dean campaign inspired him to grassroots activism. He interned for various campaigns in Vermont before being hired to run paid canvasses in Connecticut. He returned to Vermont in 2008 to work for Democracy for America, where he would go on to be Political Director, overseeing the organization's endorsements, field program, and all online programs, including fundraising.
Michael currently lives in Burlington, VT, with his comic book collection and Madonna vinyls. His hobbies include hiking and enjoying Vermont's many local-brewed beers.
As one of the great talents in the world of activism, we are extremely lucky to have Michael join the team. Before pulling the trigger, though, I called up DFA Chair Jim Dean to assure him we weren't poaching his organization's top talent. Jim claimed to be okay with it, but there was that "incident" at Netroots Nation, so who knows? (Kidding, of course. Jim and the whole team at DFA are some of our closest friends. We share the same creation story after all.)
By the way, Michael loves Madonna, in case you were wondering.