Massing on Internet Journalism

Michael Massing provides insightful commentary in The New York Review of Books on the role of the blogosphere in journalism (h/t Glenn Greenwald). Two of the better examples cited by Massing are Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo and Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish, both frequently cited here.

Sullivan is here riffing on the journalism of others while doing no conventional reporting of his own. But, as a regular reading of his posts shows, his multiple links to a wide array of sources, processed through his idiosyncratic gay-Catholic-Thatcherite- turned-libertarian-radical mind, produces an engaging and original take on the world. A dramatic demonstration of this occurred just after the Iranian elections, when his site became an up-to-the-minute clearinghouse for e-mails, Twitter feeds, YouTube videos, photos, and e-mails from Tehran, many posted before mainstream news outlets could get hold of them. Sullivan made no pretense of being balanced— he devoutly desired the overthrow of the hard-line establishment supporting Ahmadinejad and tilted his site to that end—but at a time when Western journalists were largely muzzled, The Daily Dish served as a nerve center for news from the Iranian street. While reading his site, I was also watching CNN, and it seemed clear that Sullivan, sitting at his computer, outperformed CNN's entire global network.

The Sullivan-and-Kaus snip-it-and-comment approach remains popular with many bloggers, but over the years it has given rise to a number of offspring that have become models of their own. Among the most prominent is Talking Points Memo (TPM), begun by Josh Marshall in 2000, when he was the Washington editor of The American Prospect. After constantly clashing with his fellow editors—he liked both Bill Clinton and free trade more than they did—he began freelancing and blogging on his own. While he was inspired by Sullivan and Kaus, Marshall was a reporter at heart and included on his blog more material that he had uncovered himself. The result was a new type of blog that not only commented on the news but also occasionally broke it.

Massing takes issue with the notion that the relationship between the blogosphere and traditional media is "parasitic" arguing instead that the better journalistic work done by both is more symbiotic.

--Ballard Burgher