The most important part in keeping on top of the U.S. Attorney story while the mainstream media dragged its heels comes from the relationship bloggers have with their readers, one which mainstream reporters don’t have. Marshall says that while readers send in relevant articles from local papers and news broadcasts, he and his staff don’t accept everything at face value, and fact check it just like any news organization would. Where TPM benefits in the initial fact-gathering process is that the blog, like most blogs, has a more intimate relationship with its readers, who send in tips. “We have a readership of about 100,000 people,” he says, “and that means that in any city around the country we’ve got a bunch of readers who are reading the local papers. So we’ll often find out if something happens that’s only reported in some small paper — we basically have an intelligence gathering service that mainstream reporters don’t have because they don’t have the same kind of relationship with their readers.”

Obviously, sites like TPMuckraker are few and far between, since most bloggers don’t have the time and resources to spend all day reporting and checking out stories. But in a way, this model of reporting is a great example of straddling the divide between old school shoe-leather reporting and the more aggregate method of Web reporting. And with the U.S. Attorney story at least, TPM’s staff was able to weave the disparate strands of information into a coherent whole — well before most, if not all, of the big D.C. newsrooms. Just ask Jay Carney.

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