This isn’t about politics, it is about blogs as a form of crowdsourcing journalism (maybe I should add ‘citizen’ to complete that buzzword collection).

I read a story on the LA Times about how a blog drove the the US Attorney story.

For those that don’t know, the current US General Attorney (and I guess Karl Rove, President Bush’s deputy chief of staff) are under heat for firing US attorneys’ whose politics did not line up with the administration’s.

The storyline is simple:

1. Blogger (Josh Marshall, owner of Talking Points Memo) posts that the state’s attorney is being fired.
2. He does a follow up story that several others were being replaced (an oddity mid-term). He asked his 100,000 readers to write in if they knew anything about why they were being let go.
3. Over the span of two months, they figured out who was fired, and the likely politics behind it.
4. Heads start to roll …

Of course I simplified the story, especially the grueling work of putting it all together. But what is amazing about this story is that it could never have happened without all these readers coming together. This would never have come out five years ago (with the exception of a leak). I could wax on about the great power this gives us individual users (huzzah, watch out politicians), but it should not be needed. And yes, stories like Dan Rather and the Trent Lott were also due to bloggers, but they could have been picked up by reporters too. A story like this only came out because so many people worked together in figuring out what the hell was due.

On the lighter side - am I the only one who thinks Josh Marshall looks like Dennis Quaid? (source)