Zephyr Teachout was the director of Internet Organizing for Howard Dean's presidential campaign. She is a graduate of Yale University and Duke Law School , where she was the Editor in Chief of the Duke Law Journal; she also holds an M.A. in Political Science. She co-founded the Fair Trial Initiative to support attorneys working on death penalty cases, she currently is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard where she plans to study "new, Internet-driven continuous offline communities".

After the presidential campaign ended, she worked at America Coming Together as the director of all non-swing states. Most recently, she was the founder and executive director of Baobabs College Labs , a project of Music for America .

In January 2005, Teachout sparked controversy by making the claim in a blog entry that the Dean campaign paid two popular webloggers, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos and Jerome Armstrong of MyDD , of Armstrong Zúniga, whom campaign manager Joe Trippi, to ensure positive coverage on their sites.

In 2003, Moulitsas was retained by the Howard Dean campaign as a technical advisor, an arrangement he disclosed on the site the next day. The Wall Street Journal reported on the contract with Moulitsas and Armstrong after Teachout posted on the subject in her blog, where [1] Teachout said,

On Dean’s campaign, we paid Markos and Jerome Armstrong as consultants, largely in order to ensure that they said positive things about Dean. We paid them over twice as much as we paid two staffers of similar backgrounds, and they had several other clients.

While they ended up also providing useful advice, the initial reason for our outreach was explicitly to buy their airtime. To be very clear, they never committed to supporting Dean for the payment -- but it was very clearly, internally, our goal.

The Journal reporters have been criticized for equating the two events (Moulitsas and Armstrong were not journalists) and for burying deep in the article the information that Moulitsas had promptly — and prominently — disclosed the payment, and that Armstrong had stopped blogging entirely while working for Dean. [2] Joe Trippi's recollection, while equivocal, largely contradicts Teachout. One other prominent former Dean campaign official, Matthew Gross , Director of Internet Communications, which oversaw blogger outreach for the campaign, disputed Teachout's statements. [3]

External links

• Teachout's (infrequently updated) weblog
• Blog Teachout contributes to regularly