Monday, December 31, 2007

The Writings of Steve Gilliard -- 101



“Where can we read more of his work?”

We're fortunate to still have access to primary sources.

I recommend people start with his Wikipedia entry .

Wikepedia mentions three of his most well-know essays:

In addition, read his master-work, the Colonial Warfare series.

His other most famous work is the "How to Read a 10Q" Financial Reporting Series.

I am an enormous fan of his old Netslaves articles. Here are a few of those pieces:The rest are amazingly good as well. Oh hell, here are a couple more:
Netslaves keeps adding to their archives ongoingly. There's also stuff in the Web Archives if you're truly dedicated.

Steve was one of the original front pagers at at Daily Kos. For example, this was his introduction to the front page on April 3, 2003 -- Good morning from your substitute blogger -- worth reading just for what he says about his sources.

I can't quite figure out how to search Daily Kos -- we're so far back in the archives the standard search tools don't seem to work -- but if you just keep hitting the "Next Entry" arrow up on top of the page, from Steve's introductory post, linked above, you can read his entries for the roughly six months. He stopped posting on Daily Kos in September, even though he'd started The News Blog back in August.

Here's a quote from the front page:
Daily Kos (April, 2003)

The US could easily win the war and lose the peace. It does no good to beat Saddam only to have to fight Shia guerrillas weeks or months later.
Next, dear students, we turn to the original The News Blog. Note that there were two sites: original and the new site.

The original site -- http://stevegilliard.blogspot.com/ -- is where almost all of Gilly's work lives once he set out on his own.

The first post by Gilly was on the evening of Wednesday, August 6, 2003 and his last post on the original site was the evening of Monday, January 22, 2007. That's the post with the photo of the Queen ("No Drama Queen Bullshit" was the second headline.) There's another post on Tuesday, made by Jen, his co-publisher.

We then had less than a month's worth of Gilly's posting at the new The News Blog site. The new site -- http://www.thenewsblog.net/ -- as of this writing, has a photo of Steve, the announcement of his death, and the Gilliard family's obituary for him.

To look through the new site, you have to use the search tool on the top left corner, or Google, limiting the search specifically to the new site, for example from a Google search bar: steve site:www.thenewsblog.net and then make sure to tell Google you want ALL results.

Oh, wait.. better answer. *yes!* (I so rule!)

You can read the new site at the Internet Archive. It's all there. Don't even bother going to the site directly as a number of posts were taken down near the end. My strong recommendation is to grab the new site from the Internet Archive, also known as the Wayback Machine. This is a much, much better solution than Google or even searching directly, as the Archive has every post.

Now, what the Archive does NOT have... what you can only get by going to the new site itself, are the comments. You can use the Archives to find the post you want, then use the site search function to search for the specific post using keywords, which makes the comments available to you.

Comments are available primarily only on the new site. The original site only has comments going back to about November 2006 (I think) due to the commenting system being upgraded from HaloScan. The old comments still exist. Jim in LA who ran the technical end of The News Blog, has the old comments archived off. It remains possible to restore all of the old comments back onto the original site, and to freeze commenting (to stop comment spam), but it would take a serious time commitment from someone to do what needs to be done, namely...

Upgrading Blogger to the latest version on both sites, freezing comments, making the new site easily readable again, and getting rid of any comment spam which has accumulated. And perhaps archiving all of the various sources from Daily Kos to NetSlaves to the new and old site, to one single location with a common, highly searchable interface. To me, this sounds like a good Senior or Master's Thesis project for someone in J-School, funded by a grant from someone who understands blogging. *smiles*

As for working your way through the material, after reading the above specifically recommended stuff, I suggest people start in the original site (not the new site) and using the archive links, read their way through, month by month by month.

Consider it an education in real journalism.

When you're done, you'll have the equivalent of years of study in how to write, how to think, and what it is to authentically be a progressive, not to mention a damn fine human being.

Yeah, he really was that good.

PS. There's scattered writings of Gilly's all over the place. If you find some, please... put a link and what it's to in this comment thread.

For example, here are two two reviews written less than two weeks before he went into the hospital.

Yes, we miss him. Always.


Update: July 5, 2008

Over at DailyKos, sardonyx has tracked down Gilly's DailyKos writings:
dKosopedia maintains the master reference source for DailyKos and Steve.
You may also read some (but not all) of Gilliard's DailyKos comments here.
Here are links to DailyKos pages tagged about Steve.

If you want early Steve, there's Netslaves and there's this.

Again, be certain to read Steve's masterwork, the Colonial Warfare series.

Sardonyx's terrific research at DailyKos is right up there with Steve Baldwin's ongoing research on Steve at Ghost Sites of the Web where Netslaves lives on.

Our thanks to both on a job done well, and their love and appreciation of Gilly.

Jesse Wendel 8:30 AM

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