The first cover story I put online for the Reader—back in the dark ages of 2006, when much of our content was going online in PDF format—was a profile of Georgia10, aka Georgia Logothetis, a then-23-year-old who was living with her parents, working on her JD at DePaul, and writing about politics for an audience of hundreds of thousands as a front-pager at DailyKos; in other words, as influential a political pundit as was living in Chicago, even if only a small percentage of her audience knew her real name.

In 2009 she went on hiatus from DKos to work on Alexi Giannoulias's Senate campaign as a director of new media. She's now back at Daily Kos, writing a series on the inner workings of the campaign industry: "Staffers, consultants, advisors, fundraisers — they live primarily in the shadows, in a dusty corner of our politics that receives little sunlight or accountability. Most of the billions spent in campaigns every year gets funneled through their hands." After an intro, her first essay is about call time, big donors, and finance consultants.