Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 25 February 2008 at 10:16
Tags: Blogs
The International Herald Tribune today profiles Josh Marshall, the blogging journalist who won one of American journalism’s top prizes last week.
Marshall won the Polk Award for Legal Reporting last Tuesday, for his “tenacious investigative reporting” of the scandal that led to the resignation of US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales over the way several federal prosecutors were sacked.
Notably, his reporting wasn’t published by any major newspaper or magazine, but on his own blog-format site, Talking Points Memo.
The site is one of the influential political blogs in the United States. Marshall says site has averaged 400,000 pageviews a day over the last 18 months, and 750,000 monthly unique users.
It has spawned a mini media empire, including a small team of investigative journalists, TPM Muckracker, which had a key role in uncovering the scandal with the help of its audience.
Marshall, a 39-year-old former staff and freelance writer for various American political magazines, is worth listening to for his explaination of the often-misunderstood relationship between blogging and journalism. Blogging, he tells the IHT, is merely a medium that carries his journalism.
“I think of us as journalists, the medium we work in is blogging,” he told the IHT.
“We have kind of broken free of the model of discrete articles that have a beginning and end. Instead there are an ongoing series of dispatches.”
Media bloggers have been eager to point this out as a landmark moment for blogging as a journalistic medium.
Steve Yelvington, an internet strategist for US newspaper group Morris Communications, wrote on his blog: “Now that Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo political blog has won a George Polk Award for legal reporting, can we please officially bury the tired old nonsense about blogging not being real journalism?”
Will Bunch of the Philadephia Daily News argued that Marshall’s award was “a landmark day for bloggers and the future of journalism“.
And Dan Kennedy, an assistant professor at the Northeastern University School of Journalism in Boston, wrote that the award recognised the validity of new forms of journalism including what is sometimes called “crowdsourcing”
“You see, the TPM folks did not do that much original reporting. Rather, they relentlessly kept a spotlight on what other news organizations were uncovering and watched patterns emerge that weren’t necessarily visible to those covering just a small piece of the story,” he wrote.
