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The New Web Slingers
Politcal bloggers scoop the mainstream media on Plamegate
By TIM DICKINSON
Clearly, it was the wrong moment to declare war on the blogosphere. Barely a week before the New York Times went public with its baffling account of ex-star reporter Judith Miller's unholy entanglement with vice-presidential aide "Scooter" Libby, the paper's executive editor, Bill Keller, proclaimed that Weblogs do nothing more than "recycle and chew on the news." Pride, as ever, goeth before the fall.
Caught flat-footed on the CIA-leak story, the Times saw its lunch handed to it by the new blogging elite. Leading the charge were the upstart gumshoes of RawStory.com, the pundits of the Huffington Post and a rear guard of Internet editorialists, all taking the Gray Lady to task for failing to practice the very "journalism of verification" that Keller claimed set the Times apart.
Bloggers now routinely break the major stories of the day. And their reports are getting sucked into the twenty-four-hour news cycle. "They're looking for scraps, rumors," says MSNBC Countdown host Keith Olbermann. "They'll spend hours that I don't have to go digging." According to John Byrne, the twenty-four-year-old whiz behind the Raw Story, "Bloggers go where the mainstream media fears to tread."
Here is a roundup of the bloggers who've led the media pack on Plamegate.
The Raw Story"Drudge makes shit up. We make every effort not to make shit up," says RawStory.com's Byrne. An Oberlin grad who launched Raw Story to escape the drudgery of freelancing for The Boston Globe, Byrne took a job at his father's medical office to support his blog ambition. Having founded two alternative pubs in college, Byrne runs his site on a tight budget: "We spend $250 a month -- it's incredibly cheap."
Hoping to establish a counterweight to the conservatism of the Drudge Report, Byrne started Raw Story in February 2004. The site is now breaking news the old-fashioned way -- with paid reporters. The investment has yielded a pack of Plamegate exclusives: Raw Story was first to report that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was seeking to indict Libby for obstruction of justice and that Fitzgerald had "flipped" two vice-presidential aides to cooperate.
"People talk to us because we're not the mainstream," Byrne says. "Sources who haven't been treated well by, say, The Washington Post -- they come to us." Readers, too, are tuning in, at up to 500,000 a day...........