There will some fine tuning here at TMV over the next 14 months and here’s the first: we welcome Shaun Mullen as our latest coblogger.
He started a shining jewel of a blog about a year ago called Kiko’s House. And we found that we were constantly linking to him because his content was so good. Also, he was clearly an independent thinker — passionate on issues, but not repeating a party’s line because it was a party line and not writing lockstep with any particular leader or weblog. In other words: he called the shots as he saw them, which might agree with others but he thought before he wrote. He wasn’t parroting Air America, Rush Limbaugh, or any of the big or mega-famous blogs. He just did his own thing.
And why would anyone expect otherwise? Just look at his bio on his blog:
Over a long career with newspapers, this prize-winning editor and reporter covered the Vietnam War, O.J. Simpson trials, Clinton impeachment circus and coming of Osama bin Laden, among many other major stories. He directed numerous investigative projects that embarrassed the high and mighty, landed a few deserving SOBs in jail and caused laws to be enacted that were then ignored. Mullen mentored many young reporters, some of whom went on to fame but not fortune.
In short, he has a writing, editing and mentoring background, great style and news judgment.
We were linking to him so often that it just became simpler to invite him to link to himself and when he feels like it do some original posts here. We’re greatly honored that he has agreed to join TMV’s always-independent cobloggers, commenters and readers.
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EXTENDED BODY:
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.