John Ruberry
John Ruberry of Morton Grove, Illinois, who runs the Marathon Pundit blog, will be a credentialed journalist at next week's Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.
The convention runs from September 1-4.
Ruberry has been blogging at Marathon Pundit, http://marathonpundit.blogspot.com, since 2005. He focuses on Illinois political issues, which of course are now national ones, with Barack Obama leading the ticket for the Democratic Party.
Issues outside of politcs have not escaped Ruberry's notice--he frequently writes about academia. He first reported on ex-terrorist Bill Ayers, a University of Illinois-Chicago professor, in 2006. Obama's ties to Ayers have become a political for the the Illinois senator.
Ruberry occasionaly writes about running. He carried a digitial camera when he ran last year's Chicago Marathon and he provided the best on-scene coverage of last year's event--which had to be cancelled because of unseasonably warm temperatures. Despite the cancellation, Ruberry completed the marathon.
Besides last year's race, Ruberry has run 28 marathons, including the 1994 Twin Cities Marathon.
John will be the second Ruberry to cover a national political convention. In 1968, his late father Jack reported on the proceedings of the infamous Democratic National Convention from the International Amphitheater in Chicago. Unfortunately for Jack, the big story from that event was in Chicago's South Loop--and of course that was the violent confrontation between anti-war protesters and the Chicago Police.
As for plans during the convention, Ruberry hopes to bring a "Chicago flavor" to the media coverage, and will be working to keep the mainstream media on their toes. He will participate with the Main Street Media efforts of Chad Everson's Grizzly Groundswell--
He'll also call in to Andrea Shea King's BlogTalkRadio Show. She blogs at The Radio Patrtiot: http://radiopatriot.blogspot.com.
Personal:
Ruberry has been married to his wife Marite since 1995, she is a native of Sece, Latvia. They have one daughter. John is a 1984 graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a fifth generation Chicago area resident who grew up in Palos Heights, Illinois, a southwest suburb.
Photo:
http://www.prlog.org/
