Steve Gilliard, Black Blogger, Dead at Age 42Last month, the New York Times carried the obituary of Steve Gilliard, a liberal Black blogger based in New York City who published The News Blog, and was one of the few bloggers to make a living from the advertising revenue and reader donations generated by his blog.
Gilliard was the first guest blogger at Dailykos.com when it had a mere 4000 readers a day. Now, the site has over 500,000.
In what is a now-familiar story among Internet collaborators, many of the thousands who posted online reactions to Mr. Gilliard’s death wrote that they had known little about him, even the fact that he was black.
Others, though, mourned the loss of an African-American voice in the liberal blogging world. Those closest to him offline similarly knew next to nothing about his life as blogger.
“Most of the family didn’t know what he was doing on the Web site,” said his cousin, Ms. Smith, who said his parents did not own computers.
Although we just found out, hats off to The Mad Professah for bringing Steve Gilliard to our attention. He was clearly one of the Black pioneers in this medium and we applaud his vision!