TPM as Uberblog! GQ gets it.

Everything I know about the disaster that is the Department of Justice under alberto Gonzales I have gotten from Talking Points Memo. That's true for you, too, dear reader, whether you know it or not. The same is true of Randy "Duke" Cunningham and Jack Abramoff. So GQ figured it out and has written an article about it. They recognize that TPM is "the prototype of what an Internet-based news-gathering organization might one day look like." Here is a key part in their excellent article:

On Gonzales and the United States Attorney debacle, TPM did beat the big boys, assuming “big boys” means all the newspapers, magazines, and television networks that ignored an enormously important story about the rule of law being systematically hijacked by political thugs. TPM dogged it for two months before the national press piled on in March. At that point, TPM was perhaps most valuable as an archive for all the other journalists getting up to speed. [Snip]

Marshall, 38, is a modest man with the thoughtful manner of an academic (he has a doctorate in history from Brown). He does not see himself as David standing alone against Goliath. He is not a zealot wielding the Righteous Flaming Sword of the Netroots. He is a journalist. He runs a journalism company that employs other journalists who produce very good journalism that is read by approximately 700,000 people who tend to be well educated (84 percent have college degrees), well paid (60 percent make more than $75,000 a year), and politically active (90 percent give to a cause or candidate). If TPM were a paper-and-ink medium, Marshall would be in the upper tier of American media: The Boston Globe, one the nation’s best papers, has a daily circulation of barely more than half of TPM’s readership.

The difference is that he happens to publish in the blogosphere, another term that deserves italics because it, too, is pointlessly broad, encompassing tens of millions of people with modems who send into the digital ether billions of words, of which very few are read by anyone other than their author. Even among its most intelligent and widely read practitioners—say, Atrios or Andrew Sullivan or Glenn Greenwald—blogging is typically a platform for opining and critiquing and excoriating, for commenting on what is already known. Marshall, though, has optimized the medium as a journalistic enterprise: Working in digital bits, TPM can report emerging stories in real time, updating at will, linking to other sources (including my GQ piece on Ralph Reed, in August 2006), weaving compelling narratives out of disparate threads. On a good day during the United States Attorney scandal, TPM posted more than a dozen updates.

“TPM is something new under the sun—it’s in part an opinion blog, but it’s also an investigative-reporting shop,” says New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. “And it’s having a big influence. Josh and crew did more than anyone to break the U. S. attorneys story, they’ve played a big role in uncovering the Blackwater scandal, and more. At this point, it’s hard to see how we ever lived without something like TPM. I rely on them a lot.”

“You’re making a mistake if you’re not checking in,” says Time Washington bureau chief Jay Carney. “That’s not ideological at all: They’re good at what they do. They’re the best of a breed.”

I have known this for several years, and TPM is always the first on-line news source I check each day. I am delighted to see one of the older journalistic enterprises 'get' what TPM does.

Now, if someone can just get the New York Times and other traditional media to credit their source when they steal from TPM and similar blogs, perhaps there might be some hope for the traditional media. Not professionalism, not investigative journalism, but at least maybe some hope.

[ h/t to (of course) Talking Points Memo. ]