John
was born in Manhattan in March, 1981. He’s spent
most of his life in Massachusetts, except for the
four years in college at Oberlin, a liberal arts school
in Ohio, where he majored in history and English.
His
principal work experience has been in print journalism,
including a stint as a local correspondent for the
Boston Globe, a Washington bureau reporter
for McClatchy newspapers and the editor of two college
newspapers.
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His
entrepreneurial panache led him to found a newspaper
and a magazine while still in college. This is his
first venture with an online news site, and his largest
trafficked venture to date, drawing more than 750,000
unique visitors each week. Raw Story has been linked
from and featured in The Washington Post, The
New York Times, The Guardian, Newsweek, The Toronto
Star, The New York Post, LA Weekly, Roll Call
and various other publications.
John
specializes in investigative and Congressional reporting.
He has broken numerous stories, including the devastation
wreaked by the anthrax vaccine; several corruption
scandals in the U.S. Congress surrounding disgraced
conservative lobbyist Jack Abramoff; the outing
of Congressman David Dreier and the relevation conservative
newspapers in his home district participated in a
deliberate
effort to keep Dreier's sexuality out of their
pages; proof that President
Bush was Absent Without Leave from the Texas Air National
Guard, and was the first site to carry the gay
sex voicemail of Rep.
Ed Schrock (R-Va.), who has since resigned. The
site is often the first to carry advance copies of
news stories, speeches and announcements before they
are released to the public or the press. John also
operates The Internet
Whip, a corollary Raw Story column.
As
an employer, he is demanding and anal-retentive. He
has a capacious vocabulary, which many find needlessly
bombastic and otherwise irritating. He once dubbed
Hillary Clinton the Democrats’ “leading
doyenne” and the members of Congress “tetrarchs.”
He is not, however, as pretentious as Maureen Dowd.
John’s first publication was called QuikNews,
a front and back photocopy he distributed at recess
in elementary school. It had all the prerequisites
of ten-year-old life: a word search, a sports column
and a prize. The prize was a handful of candy bars
and a dozen or so of his father’s notepads.
He donated the $12 raised in the raffle to a local
homeless shelter.
No, this is not a joke.
Most
of his time he spends working on the site or responding
to the panoply of emails associated with its operation.
Currently, he lives in Washington, D.C.
