Famous 5 Questions: Mike Madden

Meet Mike Madden, Salon.com’s Washington correspondent.

You may remember Mr. Madden from such events as:

His overtime #FDC Twitter battle versus Patrick Ruffini
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His firsthand coverage of Senator Dodd taking a room full of reporters hostage

Luckily he’s decided to spend a few minutes answering five random questions from faceless bloggers for all of us to learn about the wired Fourth Estate.

1) If you had the chance to hop in a nice American made used car and take Obama to dinner – where would you go and why?

Depends who’s paying. If I’m paying, maybe Red Rocks pizza, to show our Chicago-loving president that D.C. has pretty good pizza too (even if we don’t handle snow that well). I’d suggest Ben’s Chili Bowl, to show off a great D.C. institution, but Obama’s already discovered the place, which is why it’s now impossible to get in the door for a half-smoke. If Famous DC is paying, Komi, because the food there is great, whether you’re eating with the president or not. Actually, if Famous DC is paying, I might just head to Komi on my own, and let Obama fend for himself.

2) If Salon.com provided salon services as perks to be handed out by its journalists, who would be the first recipient of your largess, and what service would you suggest to them?

We actually do receive, at Salon’s Washington bureau, all the magazines you might usually find in salons of the other sort — as I type, several week’s worth of US Weekly, People and Allure are stacked up in a corner of my desk, and I think my colleague Mark Benjamin is perusing last month’s Lucky looking for cheap bargains and investigative reporting tips. Our name has clearly gotten us on some sort of list for free subscriptions. If Salon.com provided salon services, though, no one would really want to use them; neither of us would make very good hairdressers, masseuses or nail stylists.

3) Who’s your favorite political twit? [both sides of the aisle]

Dem — Sen. Claire McCaskill, who actually breaks news in her Twitter feed (she was posting live from closed-door negotiations on the stimulus a few months ago). GOP — Sen. Chuck Grassley, because his spelling and punctuation are more suited to a 13-year-old with a text-messaging addiction, but his updates are all about where to find the best $7 meals in Iowa (like this one ).

4) What’s your proudest moment as a journalist? Least proud moment?

The whole experience of covering last year’s crazy election was a pretty proud moment for me and for most journalists, which is good, since by the time 2012 rolls around, we will all have been replaced by a combination of Google News alerts, unpaid Huffington Post contributors and a small group of Bangalore residents working night shifts combing campaign Twitter feeds for news they can publish remotely back to Web sites in the United States.
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My least proud moment came a while back, when I was the Washington correspondent for Gannett’s Sioux Falls (S.D.) Argus Leader. Two colleagues and I broke a story that ran on the front page with a huge headline that said "He’s running" — the story was that Tom Daschle would seek the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. You may recall that didn’t happen. In our defense, the story had more than a dozen sources confirming that Daschle had told friends he would run, and it was right when the paper went to press; it only turned out to be wrong when he changed his mind by the time the paper actually got delivered in the morning. Daschle went on to bigger and better things, like becoming the lucky winner of this year’s "1,000th person nominated to join the Obama administration who didn’t pay their taxes properly" contest.

5) How do you really feel about losing to Patrick Ruffini in the FamousDC Twitter Challenge?

It was a blow I may never recover from. All my childhood dreams and aspirations, crushed, 140 characters at a time? How could anyone get over that?

*BONUS QUESTION – (from Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim ): Who’s behind this site and why are they interested in what you have to say? Bonus, tougher question: Why do they care what I have to say?

As always, Ryan Grim is onto something here — the answer to both of those questions escapes me completely. Though that may be because I’ve never really paid enough attention to Famous DC to wonder who’s behind the site. As for the bonus question, that probably helps answer the first question — anyone who’s interested in what I have to say is obviously not particularly prominent or well-respected, so that narrows down the possible candidates. Actually, if Famous DC is interested in what I have to say, the likeliest suspect for who’s behind Famous DC is probably me.

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