folo

folo header image 2
← →

“A landmark day for bloggers — and the future of journalism”

February 19th, 2008 @ 11:01 am - by lotus · 3 Comments

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to the Folo RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

That’s what Will Bunch, blogging at Attytood.com, calls this morning’s news that Josh Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo.com has deservedly won a George Polk Award for the TPM sites’ uncovering of the U.S. Attorneys scandal.

I hope you can read all of his post, especially if you weren’t reading TPM during last spring and summer. Josh and his national community of readers and commenters produced magnificent work, which — by the way — reminds me very much of what we’re all slowly accomplishing together on a one-state scale. It was inspirational to say the least, and I know NMC will be as delighted as I am to hear this (Bud Fox, bet you’ll approve too).

I predict once again that any eventual Pulitzers-of-Blogovia will have to be nicknamed “the Joshes.”

Tags:
Filed Under: Herald & Examiner

3 Responses so far ↓

  1. iratetoday says:
    February 19, 2008 at 11:16 am

    Hell at the rate you and NMC are going they may be shaped like a lotus flower!

  2. lotus says:
    February 19, 2008 at 11:25 am

    Naw, irate, Josh is the daddy of us all, and I’m so proud for him and the TPM masses.

    Listen to how Will Bunch closes his post:

    The beautiful thing about investigative reporting on blogs is narrowcasting, because a site like TalkingPointsMemo isn’t expected to be all-inclusive like the Washington Post or Time magazine. In the spring of 2007, Josh Marshall and Justin Rood and Paul Kiel and David Kurtz weren’t under any kind of moral obligation to cover all the news that’s fit to print about the French elections, the Virginia Tech massacre or even the mounting death toll in Iraq. Such issues were mentioned in short posts on occasion, but the bloggers knew that their readers — and, frankly, the public record and ensuing debates — were better served by running with the U.S. attorney’s scandal 24 hours a day. And why not? In a world of search engines and infinite cyberspace, any interested Web surfer can find the latest news from Paris or Blacksburg or Ramadi within a matter of seconds.

    And now, some of the leading traditional journalists in America have acknowledged this. That’s why it’s a landmark day — not just for bloggers, but for the news business.

    True dat.

  3. op99 says:
    February 19, 2008 at 8:29 pm

    Josh is a real class act – couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy.