A Landmark for Bloggers -- and the Future of Journalism

By Will Bunch, Attytood. Posted February 20, 2008.

The George Polk Awards are kind of like the Golden Globes of American journalism . Not as well known as those Oscars of the news business, the Pulitzer Prize, the Polk Awards are nevertheless probably a close second in terms of prestige, and this year I am especially blown away by the quality of the work they honor.

The winners include Leila Fadel, the Baghdad bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers, a 26-year-old woman who reports from some of the most dangerous regions of Iraq, as well as journalists who peeked under Vice President Cheney's veil of secrecy, toxic river pollution in China, unsafe cribs, infant mortality in Mississippi, the Blackwater scandal, human rights abuses in Burma, healthcare scams, and the courageous work of Oakland's Chauncey Bailey, who was slain as he investigated drug dealers in his hometown.

All these remarkable stories were produced in a year when the very ecomomic model for the news business was under assault, and as business pressures to scale back the kind of original reporting highlighted here continue to rise. These Polk Awards should be a powerful reminder of what society will lose if and when the business model of investigative journalism collapses completely.

But I want to highlight one Polk Award that shows there are emerging models for using the very tool at the root of the turmoil of the news business -- the Internet -- as a newfangled way to re-invent investigative reporting -- by using new techniques that emphasize collaboration over competition and by working with readers and through collective weight of many news sources to expose government misconduct.

It would have seemed incredible a couple of years ago, but a George Polk Award was given to a blogger this year.

Not just any blogger, of course. Josh Marshall (top, with his son Sam) of Talking Points Memo may have started back in 2000 as a kind of blogging stereotype, posting late at night from his small D.C. apartment and from the corner Starbucks and -- in just two years -- shining a light on the remarks that cost Sen. Trent Lott his GOP Senate leadership post, but he's turned his operation into much, much more.

Since 2002 Marshall has moved to New York and -- thanks to increasing ad revenue -- made Talking Points Memo into a new kind of journalistic enterprise for the 21st Century, hiring a staff of a half dozen talented young journalists and rewriting the rules with a mix of commentary and original muckraking while highlighting the work of other to focus like a laser on the big political questions.

Here's how and why Marshall and Talking Points Memo won a Polk Award:

"His site, www.talkingpointsmemo.com, led the news media coverage of the politically motivated dismissals of United States attorneys across the country. Noting a similarity between firings in Arkansas and California, Marshall (with staff reporter-bloggers Paul Kiel and Justin Rood) connected the dots and found a pattern of federal prosecutors being forced from office for failing to do the Bush Administration's bidding."

Hopefully, this acknowledgment of what one savvy blogger and his team have accomplished is a milestone that will speed the day when mainstream journalists realize that the best kind of blogger like Marshall is truly one of our own kind, using new tools and a new way of thinking to break a news story that otherwise might have not been discovered.

How did Josh and his cohorts do it? Here's something I wrote last year during my media-reform period (kind of like Picasso's "Blue period," except much less impressive) that tells some of the story of how Talking Points Memo exposed the scandal -- the journalism they were honored for this morning. It's very long and is a little targeted toward the news geeks among us, so it comes after the jump:

One major accomplishment kicked off on Jan. 12, 2007, when a TPM blogger, Justin Rood, wrote of a surprising story in that day's San Diego newspaper: The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California, Carol Lam, had been asked to step down. Rood knew, from TPM's heavy coverage previously of the scandalous bribery case of Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham, that Lam had prosecuted that case. Wrote Rood: "According to this morning's San Diego Union-Tribune, the White House's reason for giving her the axe is that she 'failed to make smuggling and gun cases a top priority.' But most folks the paper talked to -- supporters and detractors -- said that sounded like a load of hooey."

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Will Bunch is a senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News and author of the blog Attytood.

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