With Phil Munger of Progressive Alaska & Janson Jones of Floridana Alaskiana v2.5. I met both in person for the first time on June 23, 2009 outside the Anchorage Assembly chambers, where public testimony was being heard on the Anchorage equal rights ordinance AO 2009-64.
I had a nice surprise this afternoon when I was catching up on my blog reading & discovered that Phil Munger of Progressive Alaska had named my blog, along with Linda Kellen Biegel’s Celtic Diva’s Blue Oasis, for the Best Investigative Reporting for 2009 among Alaska progressive blogs. He recognized a number of other blogs too — see his full post “Best of Alaska’s Progressive Blogs – 2009”. All the blogs he named have long been in my RSS feed. I can’t keep up with a lot of the blogs I subscribe to, but I read all of these blogs every day.
What Phil neglected to mention, though, was the bestness of his own blog. If I were to hand out recognitions — & hey, I can, so I will — though I’m having a heckuva time coming up with a brief & tidy award title for it. Okay, so I’ll just be verbose:
Progressive Alaska stands out as the blog which does the best to build Alaska progressive blogging as a community, to put our work into context, & to recognize our significant achievements. Almost every Saturday I can expect to find his progressive blog roundups summarizing the most important stuff written by his fellow bloggers over the course of the week. And he’s been at the foremost commentator on how the gaps created by the increasing failures of the mainstream media — particularly of our supposed newspaper of record, the Anchorage Daily News — are being filled & at times even improved upon by the work of Alaska’s progressive bloggers. Phil critique of ADN’s failures have sharpened my own eyes in that regard — but I might not have noticed so much, had he not noticed it first. And that notice is needed.
That’s on top of all the posts that Phil writes on other topics, both political and artistic. All of which feeds into me feeling pretty damn good that the “occasional political blogger” stuff I wrote last year on Henkimaa.com drew such recognition from him today. To borrow an Australianism, I’m pretty damn chuffed. And I bet that the other bloggers he wrote about today are pretty damn chuffed too.
Thanks, Phil!
