Jerome Armstrong

Jerome Armstrong (born 1964) is an American political strategist. In 2001, he founded MyDD, a blog which covered politics, making him one of the first political bloggers. Armstrong coined the term netroots, and was referred to as "The Blogfather" for having mentored many other famous bloggers such as Markos Moulitsas in their early years. He is credited as one of the architects of Howard Dean's 2004 grassroots presidential campaign, and bringing those tactics to campaigns globally. In 2005, Armstrong co-founded Vox Media with Markos Moulitsas and Tyler Bleszinski. Background Armstrong was an environmental activist in the late 1980s, working with Greenpeace and Earth First! to curtail the logging of old growth forests in Oregon and end nuclear weapons testing in Nevada. During the 1990s, he served with the US Peace Corps in Costa Rica and worked with UNICEF in Sierra Leone, spent a year and a half at a Buddhist monastery, served in Americorps under the "I Have A Dream" program, and did community organizing in Portland, Oregon. Armstrong has graduate degrees in Conflict Resolution and Applied Linguistics. Online advocacy In 2001, he founded MyDD, a blog which covered American politics, in which Armstrong's work was described by Salon as being "fiercely partisan but not radically left-wing." In 2004, Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas founded BlogPAC, a political action committee focused on progressive bloggers and politics online. In late 2005, Campaigns and Elections credited MyDD with being "the first major liberal blog". In January 2006, the name was changed to "My Direct Democracy" as part of a site redesign, with a new tagline, "Direct Democracy for People-Powered Politics".