The story behind the furor over the firings of the 8 US Attorneys is the story itself. In the days following the firings little was made of it by the big D.C. media players. No there there was the implication. When bloggers, and particularly Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, kept at it elements of the Certified by Selves crew in Washington hissed about left wing conspiracy theorists. Well well. While these Certifieds were drafting their snark Marshall and others kept at it, doing elemental gumshoe dectective work, combined with the new online networks of volunteer cullers and linkers. Turns out there was much of a there there.
CJR (Columbia Journalism Review) has a good rundown on the matter, and shows how a new media is evolving.
TPM reporter Paul Kiel says that David Kurtz, a reader of TPM who posts for Marshall on the weekends on TalkingPointsMemo, noticed some stories in the Arkansas papers about Timothy Griffin — a former adviser to Karl Rove — replacing Bud Cummins, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas. Then on January 12, TPM’s Justin Rood flagged a piece in the San Diego Union-Tribune that raised questions about the firing of U.S. Attorney Carol Lam, and according to Kiel, “that’s when our collective hair caught fire, and over the next couple days, putting Griffin’s appointment together with Lam’s [story], and then the other firings as they were reported, we went back and tried to put the pieces together.”
At the time — mid-January — TPM’s reporters were surveying media around the country and following up links to local papers sent in by readers, “so it was kind of a mix of what you might call blog reporting and traditional reporting,” or what might be termed a kind of “wisdom of crowds” method of reporting, combined with some good old-fashioned banging of the phones.
… Marshall seems to be blazing a unique middle ground between “citizen journalism” and true investigative reporting, while not buying in to some of the more robust claims by some in the blogosphere (particularly on the right) that this “new journalism” is crushing traditional news-gathering operations. In fact, if it weren’t for reporters at smaller newspapers around the country raising alarms in the first place, the story would likely have died a quiet death.
My take is that this shifting and growth follows well known patterns of evolution. New conditions (weather changes, terrain shifts in the natural world; technology in the social world) change the foundations of life; what was once easy, becomes difficult; what was once unknown becomes opportunity. Adaptation or disaster follows. Big Player (Viacom) screaming over the unfairness of posting bits of video on YouTube is the screaming of lizards over terrain change. They can sue all they want. The world is changing and unless they find a way to adapt their days are numbered. So too with the big print media. Of course we need paid reporters, smart and unencumbered with loyalties other than to the truth. To get that, new financial models will have to emerge so reporters can be paid. We who need others to get the facts, shape them into coherent stories, determine their order of importance in the telling, have to be part of this new economic model: that is, nothing is free. We get there I believe by looking forward at the opportunities coming up rather than by howling about the warm and familiar spots atop the food chain lost.