Los Angeles Times: Blogs can top the presses

From the Los Angeles Times:

"It's 20 or so blocks up town to the heart of the media establishment, the Midtown towers that house the big newspaper, magazine and book publishers. And yet it was here in a neighborhood of bodegas and floral wholesalers that, over the last two months, one of the biggest news stories in the country — the Bush administration's firing of a group of U.S. attorneys — was pieced together by the reporters of the blog Talking Points Memo."

"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."

Comment: It's so nice to see the MSM giving the blogosphere credit for doing quality journalism. This story could help the media turn the corner from the bloggers vs. journalists mindset to a collaborative environment where we actually end up with better journalism.