The New Web Slingers

RollingStone.com: The New Web Slingers : Politics

"Clearly, it was the wrong moment to declare war on the blogosphere. Barely a week before The New York Times went public with its baffling account of ex-star reporter Judith Miller's unholy entanglement with vice-presidential aide 'Scooter' Libby, the paper's executive editor, Bill Keller, proclaimed that Weblogs do nothing more than 'recycle and chew on the news.' Pride, as ever, goeth before the fall.

Caught flat-footed on the CIA-leak story, the Times saw its lunch handed to it by the new blogging elite. Leading the charge were the upstart gumshoes of RawStory.com, the pundits of the Huffington Post and a rear guard of Internet editorialists, all taking the Gray Lady to task for failing to practice the very 'journalism of verification' that Keller claimed set the Times apart.

Bloggers now routinely break the major stories of the day. And their reports are getting sucked into the twenty-four-hour news cycle. 'They're looking for scraps, rumors,' says MSNBC Countdown host Keith Olbermann. 'They'll spend hours that I don't have to go digging.' According to John Byrne, the twenty-four-year-old whiz behind the Raw Story, 'Bloggers go where the mainstream media fears to tread.'"