LA Times gives a major shout out to Josh Marshall

[CatWoman]

Blogs can top the presses

Talking Points Memo drove the U.S. attorrneys story, proof that Web writers with input from devoted readers can reshape journalism.

New York — IN a third-floor Flower District walkup with bare wooden floors, plain white walls and an excitable toy poodle named Simon, six guys dressed mainly in T-shirts and jeans sit all day in front of computer screens at desks arranged around the oblong room's perimeter, pecking away at their keyboards and, bit by bit, at the media establishment.

The world headquarters of TPM Media is pretty much like any small newsroom, anywhere, except for the shirts. And the dog. And the quiet. Most newsrooms are notably noisy places, full of shrill phones and quacking reporters. Here there is mainly quiet, except for the clacking keyboards.

It's 20 or so blocks up town to the heart of the media establishment, the Midtown towers that house the big newspaper, magazine and book publishers. And yet it was here in a neighborhood of bodegas and floral wholesalers that, over the last two months, one of the biggest news stories in the country — the Bush administration's firing of a group of U.S. attorneys — was pieced together by the reporters of the blog Talking Points Memo.

The bloggers used the usual tools of good journalists everywhere — determination, insight, ingenuity — plus a powerful new force that was not available to reporters until blogging came along: the ability to communicate almost instantaneously with readers via the Internet and to deputize those readers as editorial researchers, in effect multiplying the reporting power by an order of magnitude.

In December, Josh Marshall, who owns and runs TPM , posted a short item linking to a news report in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette about the firing of the U.S. attorney for that state. Marshall later followed up, adding that several U.S. attorneys were apparently being replaced and asked his 100,000 or so daily readers to write in if they knew anything about U.S. attorneys being fired in their areas.

For the two months that followed, Talking Points Memo and one of its sister sites, TPM Muckraker, accumulated evidence from around the country on who the axed prosecutors were, and why politics might be behind the firings. The cause was taken up among Democrats in Congress. One senior Justice Department official has resigned, and Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales is now in the media crosshairs.

This isn't the first time Marshall and Talking Points have led coverage on national issues. In 2002, the site was the first to devote more than just passing mention to then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott's claim that the country would have been better off had the segregationist 1948 presidential campaign of Sen. Strom Thurmond succeeded. The subsequent furor cost Lott his leadership position.

Similarly, the TPM sites were leaders in chronicling the various scandals associated with Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-blogs17mar17,0,2952916.story?coll=la-home-nation

[dae]

1. One more for the shrill, useless, lying, blogs of the left!

:)

[Missy Vixen]

2. I am thrilled to K&R

I read Firedoglake for the CIA leak case coverage, TPM for the US Attorney coverage, and several other blogs per day. They are offering something the MSM can't match -- three chords and the truth.

Julie

[Clark2008]

4. And they have a beat and you can dance to them.

:hi:

[Hekate]

3. KnR. It's a very cool article. The Times is spread out on my kitchen table...

...and I'm still reading this blogs story.

Some (maybe even a lot) of the reporters at the Times certainly get it -- the sad thing is that their corporate masters in Chicago are dumbing down the paper even as we speak.

I'm a product of past generations -- I privilege paper copies. I like being able to flip back and forth between sections, I like getting out my pen and circling bits of text. I like the semi-permanence of paper, and I have newspaper clippings that go back past the Kennedy assassination (Jack's, not Bobby's) to the major volcanic eruption on the Big Island that sent airy bits of lava floating onto Oahu's beaches. I clip cartoons for my fridge door. I would feel a great sense of loss if I gave up my daily newspaper.

On the other hand, I am utterly dismayed at the number of times since 2000 that I have had to go online to get the real story about events that affect my life. How many people showed up at the early anti-war marches -- the ones that predated Shock and Awe? If it were not for online posters and their first-person accounts and personal photographs, I would have thought that my friends and I were the only people in the country taking our anger to the streets in our small city. I would have believed that a scant few thousand showed up in Washington DC, when in fact participants' online photos showed the streets packed as far as the eye could see. A large number of Americans knew we were being lied to — and to this day the mainstream media insists on minimizing those early numbers.

Newspapers and the mainstream media generally are working very hard at making themselves irrelevant. We still need them for comprehensive coverage of our local towns, our nation, and our world. As wonderful as the blogs are, it will be a terrible loss when the last of the great newspapers devolves into gossip and propaganda.

Whew. That feels like a LTTE. Think I'll clean it up and send it to the LAT.

Hekate

[Cooley Hurd]

5. Late-nite K&R...

TPM deserves every accolade for this!:thumbsup:

[lutefisk]

6. Well deserved recognition.

The whole "blog" label seems to trivialize the efforts, but still, nice recognition of excellent work!

[Starfury]

7. Kerry apparently gets it - wants to improve bloggers' FOIA access