Major Media Gives Blog Credit Where It Is Due

If NewsChannel5 and the Tennessean want an example of how to source their material rather than improperly lifting information from blogs without giving credit to the authors of those blogs, they need look no farther than yesterday's LA Times, which recognized the amazing coverage of the expanding "U.S. Attorney Purge" (the most recent Bush Administration scandal) by Talking Points Memo from the very beginning. Writes the Times:

The bloggers used the usual tools of good journalists everywhere — determination, insight, ingenuity — plus a powerful new force that was not available to reporters until blogging came along: the ability to communicate almost instantaneously with readers via the Internet and to deputize those readers as editorial researchers, in effect multiplying the reporting power by an order of magnitude.

The Times writer provides a fairly breath-taking account of TPM's handle on the developing scandal including unearthing a largely ignored national pattern of firings after an initial story hit the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in December.

Some of us should be shown the same love locally.