The woman who might be Chicago’s most-read political writer doesn’t have an office. On most days Georgia Logothetis, 23, is either at home in the same Rogers Park three-flat where she lives with her parents or at DePaul University’s downtown campus. About four or five times a day, taking a break from constitutional law homework or prepping for a moot-court trial, she’ll type a righteously indignant rant clobbering the Republican Party on Iraq, warrantless spying, and the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. Then she’ll post it, under the screen name Georgia10, on the front page of liberal blog Daily Kos (dailykos.com), which gets between 400,000 and 800,000 unique visitors daily. The Tribune’s daily circulation, just for some context, is about 586,000; its Web site gets a little over three million unique visitors per month, which averages out to around 100,000 a day. (The Tribune won’t release stats on how many visitors its blogs or news columnists get.)
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The site can claim some influence outside the self-contained world of liberal politics as well. In May 2005 Logothetis and other Daily Kos denizens launched downingstreetmemo.com, which brought renewed attention to a leaked British government memo from 2002 in which an official wrote that “intelligence and facts were being fixed” by the Bush administration to support its case for invading Iraq. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman mentioned the site, bringing it to the attention of a larger audience; Logothetis was quoted by the Sun-Times’s Lynn Sweet and the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz.
Despite her sizable readership–her posts inspire dozens of responses and she receives as many as 100 e-mails daily–only her parents and a few friends know that Logothetis is Georgia10. “I’ll be in a class with a hundred people with laptops and I see people pulling up the site and reading my work,” she says. “And they don’t know I’m the one who wrote the article.”
An ugly battle played out over several months in the pages of the student paper, the Independent; Logothetis and her allies boned up on the school’s constitution and election procedures before making their case before the student supreme court. “Back then it seemed like the most important thing in the world,” she says.
She didn’t start posting, however, until she was “devastated” by the presidential election results. “I loved John Kerry,” she says. “I know you don’t hear that every day. But I could relate to him a lot.” When stories about alleged voter suppression and voting irregularities began emerging from Ohio, she paid close attention, having gone through a contested election herself. Twice a day she was posting updates about, as she puts it, “all the voter suppression in Ohio, and documenting all the connections between the Bush-Cheney campaign and the elected politicians there.”
In December he started an “open thread” inviting readers to nominate their favorite posters. Georgia10 received an avalanche of support. “Yes, yes, hell yes,” wrote one user. “Georgia10 is fucking brilliant.” Another wrote: “She always has her finger on the pulse of Daily Kos, and her intellectual (not to mention good-natured) disposition always shines through.”
In the meantime, Logothetis’s blogging has proved useful for her academically. She’s researched warrantless spying so thoroughly that she decided to write about it for her final paper in a senior seminar on the legal challenges presented by the war on terror. “I wrote so much on FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] and the NSA scandals that when they do Google searches, it’s my work that comes up,” she says. “I wanted to tell my professor that if anything other students write looks like something I write, I got there first.”
