But for sheer volume, dedication, facts at his fingertips, and hackle-raising headlines, none can compare with Joe Romm. New York Times columnist, Tom Friedman, has twice in the past two months shouted Joe out as "physicist and climate expert," and his blog, ClimateProgress.org, as "indispensible." In March 2009, Rolling Stone magazine named Romm to its list of "100 People Who Are Changing America." This month U.S. News & World Report featured Romm as one of five "key players" in its article "Driving Public Policy in Washington," writing, " in terms of his cachet in the blogosphere, Joe Romm is something like the climate change equivalent of economist (and New York Times columnist) Paul Krugman."
Not that you need to know the details, but our daily grind here at SMT is to go into the content management systems of each our sites and approve, or not, hundreds of posts from a variety of bloggers. Most typically, we have at any one time on the site a post from a blogger here, a blogger there, listed individually. On any given day, when we open our TheEnergyCollective administration system, we see a half-dozen or more posts from Joe. He could, in fact, be his own blog aggregation site.
Although passionate about his topic and, as a former acting assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy in the Clinton administration, knowledgeable as well, Joe has journalistic genes. "My father was a newspaper editor and wrote on average three editorials a day for 30 years. So it is kind of in my blood. I don't really take any vacations from blogging, since climate change and global warming deniers don't seem to take any vacations. When I go on vacation with my family I cut down the amount of blogging about 50%."
Originally, Romm saw his role as mainly to "correct and criticize media coverage, to debunk global warming deniers, and to articulate the clean energy solution to our climate and peak oil problems.... But over time the blog has become a primary information site for many of my readers, so I really feel some obligation to cover every major issue related to climate science, solutions, and politics that I feel any informed person needs to know about. I really try to save my readers time by cutting through the overwhelming clutter of information, misinformation, and disinformation."A classic blogger in that he measures his role in terms of influence, Romm is also keenly aware of his basic traffic numbers - which keep on growing. Recently he partnered with a rep firm for progressive bloggers to sell advertising on his site, which occasioned his post on "Why I have ads from the Nuclear Energy Institute." But as his audience and influence grow, his success will not answer, for us, the nagging question of which is more important in the blogosphere: volume or quality.
With Joe Romm, you have both.