CJR Daily pimps TPM on USA purge

Columbia Journalism Review Daily has a nice piece about Talking Points Memo played a major role in breaking the US Attorney purge scandal. In this section, the piece emphasizes how TPM did less traditional reporting and did more filtering of available information.

TPM reporter Paul Kiel says that David Kurtz, a reader of TPM who posts for Marshall on the weekends on TalkingPointsMemo, noticed some stories in the Arkansas papers about Timothy Griffin -- a former adviser to Karl Rove -- replacing Bud Cummins, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas. Then on January 12, TPM's Justin Rood flagged a piece in the San Diego Union-Tribune that raised questions about the firing of U.S. Attorney Carol Lam, and according to Kiel, "that's when our collective hair caught fire, and over the next couple days, putting Griffin's appointment together with Lam's [story], and then the other firings as they were reported, we went back and tried to put the pieces together."

I realized recently that I've been reading that blog since before the 00 election, that's seven years of reading a blog - craziness, living in the future.