Speaking of Josh Marshall's blogging empire, here is a concrete and positive reason to donate to TPM:
New Technique Lets Bloggers Tackle Late-Night News Dumps - March 21, 2007 - The New York Sun :
A time-honored Washington practice of trying to extinguish, pre-empt, or redirect news coverage by dumping stacks of previously secret government documents on the press may be in for some changes after a headlong collision with hundreds of liberal Web loggers in the wee hours of yesterday morning.On Monday night, the Justice Department delivered to Congress more than 3,000 pages of e-mails, memos, and other records about the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. The handover came so late that many news organizations had to scramble to try to skim a few headlines from the files before latenight deadlines.
Despite the late hour, readers of a liberal Web site, tpmmuckraker.com, tackled the task with gusto. They quickly began grabbing 50-page chunks of the scanned documents from a House of Representatives Internet server, analyzing them and excerpting them. The first post about the Department of Justice records hit the left-leaning news and commentary site at 1:04 a.m. Within half an hour, there were 50 summaries posted by readers gleaning the documents. By 4:30 a.m., more than 220 postings were up detailing various aspects of the files.
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An attorney who helped President Clinton manage Whitewater and other scandals, Mark Fabiani, said the immediate and intense scrutiny from hundreds of sets of eyes would have experts in crisis communications reconsidering some of their tactics.“You're right to regard it as a major development,” Mr. Fabiani told The New York Sun. “It could really change the way things get done.”
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At the Clinton White House, Mr. Fabiani's preference was to release potentially damaging information right before the weekend. “My friends in the media used to call them Fabiani Fridays. … You had hard-copies of stuff. You'd put them all in a room,” he said. “We would say to people, ‘Here are six stacks. You go on through them.'” The NBC television show “The West Wing” immortalized the practice in an episode titled “Taking Out the Trash.”Mr. Fabiani said some of that would be less effective in the face of legions of bloggers willing to pool their findings. In the Whitewater era, he said, “There was competition among the reporters.” As a result, individual journalists reviewing the records often never made it through all of them and had to run with the first interesting nugget they came across. “The stories were all over the place,” the attorney said. “No one was going to go back and retrace their steps.”
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