Kevin Drum, who gave up his day job in software marketing to write online about politics, policy and his cats, quickly becoming a key figure in the vanguard of center-left bloggers during the genre’s heyday in the early 2000s, died on March 7. He was 66.
His wife, Marian Drum, announced the death on his website but did not say where he died or cite a cause.
Mr. Drum, who lived in Irvine, Calif., had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2014 and had recently developed pneumonia. He blogged about those personal challenges openly and with the same insight that he brought to issues like health care policy and urban planning.
He spent most of his life in Orange County, Calif., which distinguished him from the majority of early big-name bloggers, many of whom hailed from the Washington-Boston corridor or from academic enclaves.
Mr. Drum began blogging in 2002 and quickly developed a large nationwide following. He helped shape what became known as the liberal blogosphere, populated by a broad amalgam of left-of-center thinkers who emphasized policy debates over political horse races.
His curiosity was broad, and he wrote on a variety of subjects from a variety of perspectives — sometimes casually observational, sometimes rigorously analytical — in a way that set him apart from the assorted camps that defined the blogosphere, including academics, politicos and ideologues.
“He was able to absorb and summarize and comment on what all of those different camps were saying with a judiciousness and fair-mindedness that a lot of the others lacked,” Paul Glastris, the editor of Washington Monthly, who hired him in 2004 to write its Political Animal blog, said in an interview.
Four years after that, Mr. Drum moved to Mother Jones, where he wrote not just blog posts but also extensive reported pieces for the magazine.
Most notable was a deep dive in 2013 into the theory that the crime wave of the late 20th century was driven in large part by childhood exposure to lead in gasoline and paint, a key factor in the development of behavioral problems and, in turn, delinquency. As lead was phased out, health outcomes improved and crime rates dropped.
“He was just able to unpack very complicated — particularly economically complicated — stories in an immensely readable way,” said Clara Jeffery, the editor in chief of Mother Jones.
Like other bloggers, Mr. Drum cultivated a lively comments section, which in the days before social media served as a kind of online meeting place. But while some blogs tolerated rank partisanship, name-calling and worse, he set a tone of civility and respect, in his writing as well as in his comment moderation.
He also invented Friday cat blogging.
“I’d just blogged a whole bunch of stuff about what was wrong with the world,” he told The New York Times in 2004. “And I turned around and I looked out the window, and there was one of my cats, just plonked out, looking like nothing was wrong with the world at all.”
He posted a photo of the cat, Inkblot, and then did it again the next week. And the next. Soon other bloggers were doing the same thing, or something similar, as a way of lowering the temperature of the week’s debates.
Friday cat blogging illustrated the balance that Mr. Drum brought to his work: serious but not humorless, wonky but not soulless. It seemed quirky, but it eroded the line separating writers, their subjects and their readers — an erosion that, in turn, influenced journalism in the 21st century.
Blogging “remade conventional journalism in a lot of ways, from pace to voice,” said Josh Marshall, the editor of Talking Points Memo. “And Kevin was a really important, significant element.”
Kevin Dale Drum was born on Oct. 19, 1958, in Long Beach, Calif., and grew up in nearby Garden Grove. His father, Dale Drum, was a professor of speech and film history at California State University, Long Beach, who began writing a biography of the Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer but died before he could finish it. Kevin’s mother, Jean (Holliger) Drum, completed the book and published it in 2000 under the title “My Only Great Passion: The Life and Films of Carl Th. Dreyer.”
Kevin started college at the California Institute of Technology, but after two years he transferred to Cal State Long Beach, where he studied journalism and helped edit the student newspaper. He graduated in 1981.
With a recession tearing through the country, it was a hard time to find work in journalism, so he got a job at RadioShack. He also wrote manuals for a tech company and later worked in marketing for software companies.
Mr. Drum married Marian Riegel in 1993. Along with her, his survivors include a sister, Karen. (His cats, Hilbert and Charlie, also survive him.)
At Mother Jones, he was responsible for a considerable increase in online readership. But he refused repeated offers of a pay raise, insisting that the money should instead go to support the magazine’s fellows program.
In 2014, when Mr. Drum revealed his cancer diagnosis, he leavened the moment with characteristic self-deprecation. “Later tests showed that I also had lesions in my upper arm, my rib cage, and my skull — which means that my conservative friends are now correct when they call me soft-headed,” he wrote.
With the liberal blogosphere moving further to the left, it was perhaps inevitable that tensions would occasionally arise between a blogger with a centrist outlook and Mother Jones’s younger staff members. They and many others online were incensed by posts Mr. Drum wrote criticizing the use of subtitles in the South Korean movie “Parasite” (2019), which some considered a racist position, and denouncing Tara Reade, who in 2020 accused Joe Biden of sexual misconduct.
But the occasional blowback, which quickly passed, did not faze him; he took ideas seriously, but he did not take himself seriously.
Despite his treatment regimen, he continued at Mother Jones until 2021, when he left to start his own blog, Jabberwocking.
It was a fitting return to his original form after a career in traditional journalism. Blogging, he felt, could be adjacent to newspapers and magazines without being part of their world.
“If you try to put the rules of mainstream journalism onto blogs,” he told The American Journalism Review in 2004, “you end up sucking the life out of them.”