The Gilliard News

From 1996 to 1998 or thereabouts, before there was Eschaton, before there was Daily Kos, before there were any blogs, right or left, there was The Gilliard News.

When the internet web message boards (such as FreeRepublic.com and Lucianne.com) and proto-weblogs (such as Drudge’s shop) were almost all conservative, The Gilliard News stood out because it was one of the few non-conservative websites out there.

For years, Gilly stood out there, all alone aside from Salon.com and Joe Conason over at the New York Observer, speaking his mind and letting it all hang out — on why The New York Times did and does such a horrible job covering the city for which it was named (the Daily News and even the Post pay more attention to the city and its neighborhoods), on Democratic politics, on liberalism in general and effective political action, and of course on Why The Yankees Suck. It had maps of the city, tips on New Yorker etiquette, and was a fun and useful read.

I was steered to the site by a New York friend of mine; I struck up an online conversation with Gilly, in which he told me about a new web magazine called Salon.com. I checked it out, hopped into its “Table Talk” message boards (where lots of the A-list bloggers hung out in the days before blogging got off the ground), and haven’t looked back since.

Almost all traces of The Gilliard News have vanished now (clicking on the old website link brings up nothing, and not even The Wayback Machine has it archived), but in its heyday in the mid-’90s, before Gilly apparently gave it up to work for Netslaves, it was the place for non-New-Yorkers to go and learn from a New Yorker about the city that never sleeps, particularly from the perspective of a black resident of the city. Like the magazine The New Yorker, Gilly’s focus at The Gilliard News was New York City and he gloried in it.

I wish there was some more left of it than my poor memory thereof. Maybe it still exists on some of Steve’s old backup disks. But I just wanted to let the record show that before there was Yearly Kos, the various Kos Schismites, Atrios, TBogg, Digby, or any other blogger, A-List or otherwise, there was Steve Gilliard — and that as Kos points out, Gilly helped turn Daily Kos from just one guy shouting into a void into the blogosphere giant it is today.