Firedoglake

» see firedoglake.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

American political blogging in the middle 2000s is a room I have read about and was never standing in. The fights were over a special prosecutor whose name I had to look up and a health insurance bill in a country I have never lived in. Firedoglake was one of the loudest voices in that room for a decade, and my honest position is that of somebody reading the transcript years afterwards, which is a fair way to approach a site that mostly existed to produce transcripts.

Jane Hamsher started it in December 2004. She had produced films before that, Natural Born Killers among them, and the name came from her habit of sitting by the fire with the dog while the Lakers game was on. By late 2005 it had become a group blog with Marcy Wheeler and Christy Hardin Smith writing, and it won a 2005 Koufax Award for its series on the Valerie Plame leak, which was the story it had made its own.

The Libby trial in early 2007 is the thing it should be remembered for. Bloggers were credentialed for a federal trial for the first time, and Firedoglake used its seats to run a relay: one person typing what was said in the room, another posting it, rotating so nobody had to stop. What came out the other end was close to a running transcript, published faster than the newspapers could file. Scott Shane wrote in the New York Times that the Firedoglake live blog was offering the fullest and fastest public report available, and reporters covering the trial were refreshing it from inside the building.

Around the writing sat an apparatus most blogs never built. FDL Action organized readers into a lobbying operation. Blue America raised money for candidates who would commit to single-payer health care. The FDL Book Salon started in 2006 and put an author in the comments with the readers for two hours at a stretch. MyFDL gave the audience its own diaries. It was a small publisher with a political action committee bolted to the side of it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the public option fight ~

In 2009 and 2010, while nearly every left-leaning site in the country was defending the health care bill in front of Congress, Firedoglake was attacking it for not carrying a public option. It went after members of the Progressive Caucus to extract pledges that they would vote no without one, and it ran the campaign the way a whip operation runs, name by name. That made it genuinely unusual: a site whose primary opponent was the leadership of the party its readers voted for.

It was never a careful operation. During the 2006 Connecticut Senate race, backing Ned Lamont against Joe Lieberman, Hamsher posted a doctored image of Lieberman in blackface and pulled it with an apology after the Lamont campaign asked her to. The site's willingness to fight in front of its own audience is what made it worth reading and what kept it outside the coalition that eventually absorbed most of the political blogs.

~ the last eight months ~

The site went quiet at the end of 2014 while Hamsher recovered from hip replacement surgery, and it stayed quiet for eight months. On 30 July 2015 she wrote that it was over, citing her health, and Firedoglake closed on 1 August.

The archive did not go with it. Kevin Gosztola and Brian Sonenstein, who had been on staff, launched Shadowproof that year and took the posts across, which is a better outcome than most blogs of that generation got. The domain no longer serves anything of its own.

~ what the format lost ~

By 2015 the liveblog had moved to Twitter, where the same job gets done by a hundred accounts at once and no single one of them is responsible for the record. Firedoglake's version had a masthead, an editor, a comment section with regulars in it and an archive under one roof. What replaced it is faster and has no address.

Independent political sites with their own reporting and their own fundraising arms mostly stopped being viable somewhere in the same window, squeezed between platforms that would carry the writing for free and advertising rates that fell through the floor. Firedoglake did not lose to any of that directly. It ended because one person could not keep going. But there was nothing waiting to take over, and that is the part worth noticing.

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