Jerome Armstrong

Jerome Armstrong (born February 26, 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 '04 grassroots presidential campaign, and bringing those tactics to campaigns globally. Armstrong stopped blogging entirely in 2010, instead going to work for the campaign of Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson for the 2012 cycle. He is one of the co-founders of Vox Media.

Armstrong was an environmental activist in the late 1980s, working with Greenpeace and Earth First!. He later served with the Peace Corps, spent a year and a half at a Buddhist monastery, served in Americorps, with the I Have A Dream program, and did field organizing in Portland, OR in the early 1990s. Armstrong has graduate degrees in Conflict Resolution and Applied Linguistics.

In 2001, he founded MyDD, a blog which covered politics with an openly Democratic partisan perspective. In 2004 Jerome and Markos Moulitsas founded BlogPAC, a political action committee focused on progressive bloggers and politics online.

Campaigns and Elections, in an early netroots profile in Oct-Nov 2005, as part of the article "Blogging Down the Money Trail", 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."

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