We are moving up in the world... Being an elite liberal fashion snob, I bought the latest Vanity Fair - mostly, to be honest, for the piece on the debate over head scarves in France - and stumbled across an article on political blogs, with the Daily Kos logo in the article graphic.
So I turn the page and there's a photo of Kos, and a good chunk of the article about him. Here are some excerpts. It's the April 2004 issue with Keira Knightley on the cover. For your amusement, incidentally, a pull-quote from another section of the article reads: "Sullivan attracts so many personal attacks because he makes it so easy... like a bad tenor begging to be pelted with fresh produce."
Anyway:
Kos, the newly crowned King of Blogistan!
Who he?, as Harold Ross might ask. Kos is the army nickname of Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, who was born in Chicago in 1971 and raised in El Salvador, returning to the U.S. when his family fled that country's civil war. After high school, he enlisted in the army and was stationed in Germany, an artillery guy. After earning two bachelor's degrees, he moved to San Francisco and started Daily Kos in 2002. In those days of misty watercolor memories it took Daily Kos a month to get the number of hits it now racks up in a day.
[...]
Kos's latest brainstorm is to use the blogosphere as a "farm system" to fund and groom the next wave of liberal writers and pundits, a counterforce to the conservative-think-tank infrastructure and its modeling academies, where juicy novices master the Ann Coulter Hair Toss and special tanning secrets.
From the outset Daily Kos was devised as a choral suite rather than a solitary squawk box. "Without the community, I wouldn't be anything," Kos says. He opened up the main column to some of the best posters from the comments section, and set up a diaries section for posters - blogs within his blog. Some of the most talented Daily Kossacks splintered off to start blogs of their own, listed on the Kos's blog roll under "Alumni." "The meritocracy of the blogosphere appeals to me," Kos says.