Recognition for TPM's Great Work

As I have said before, Joshua Micah Marshall's TPM has been one of the best blogs for years and, as this article in the LA Times makes very clear, is not composed of just opinion. They have been doing basic legwork as well and have inventively used the national network of their readers to put together the story on the Justice Department firings that had been missed by the mainstream media.

It's 20 or so blocks up town [NYC] 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.