In a first, Polk award goes to blogger, Josh Marshall of TPM for legal reporting. [View All]

[Hamlette]

good news for internet junkies and investigative journalism. Congrats Josh!

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

"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.”

In the pre-Internet era, such a story might well have died in the recycling bins of San Diego. But because of TPM’s background knowledge in the Cunningham case and its skeptical stance, it was more aggressive in questioning whether there was a connection between Lam’s ouster and her probe of powerful Republicans – and their friends in the defense contracting industry. So TPM did something that the San Diego paper wouldn’t be much inclined to do -- Rood, Marshall and their readers scanned the Internet to see if any other U.S. attorneys had been fired lately, and conducted research to find out if mid-term firings of U.S. attorneys were common. (They weren’t).

http://www.attytood.com/2008/02/a_landmark_day_for_bloggers_an_1.html