New Media Live

To feed my obsession with the transformation of journalism by the Internet, I went with Hal to Stanford to see a lecture by Josh Marshall. Marshall writes a blog called Talking Points Memo. He employs eight people, and in a lot of ways, they are a living example of how the Internet is changing journalism. He won the Polk Award for his role in uncovering the US attorney firings scandal, something that probably would never have been stitched together without the kind of information flow that results from his readers interacting with him and his staff. And fret not: while TPM is fundamentally a liberal site for political junkies, they claim to do as rigorous a job of fact checking on material they publish as any of the mainstream media. It was an interesting talk, with a number of interesting questions posed during the follow-up.