1. Interviewed.

2. Featured. (If you don’t see me, click here.)

3. Work: I have begun working as a freelance writer (er, I guess the word is blogger) for ESL Library and Expatistan. I’ll post links when my pieces go live.

Update 6/8/11: As promised, links: ESL Library post and Expatistan article.

Getting involved was easy enough. I contacted some people at the paper, was introduced to the photography editors, and was handed a camera the first time I entered the newspaper’s building. To start writing, I emailed the sports editors. They told me to write a sample column; if it was good, the paper would run it.

I worked hard on that column. After all, it was my one shot, I thought, to start writing for the paper. I spent a day or two on it, and sent it to the sports editors. They called me into the building that night to edit it. It would run the next day.

Everything went from there. I made staff as a photographer, wrote a weekly sports column for the rest of the year, and found myself unexpectedly the paper’s opinion editor a year later. By the time I became an editor, I didn’t look back at my old columns or even think about them often.

So an email I received last January came out of deep left field:

Hi Pete,

Bedford/St. Martin’s, a textbook publisher in Boston, Mass., is hoping to reprint your piece, “Even More Than the Game, Drugs Destroy Athletes,” (Yale Daily News 9/25/2007) in our new edition of The Bedford Reader. The Bedford Reader is a collection of excellent writing by both student and well-known writers and includes such names as Maya Angelou, David Sedaris, and John Updike. “Even More Than the Game” would go in the argument and persuasion chapter of this book.

We’ll send you an official permissions request to use this piece soon, but assuming you’d be willing to grant us permission to use the piece, I was wondering if I could bother you for a couple of things:

1)       Some biographical information for the headnote (nothing fancy, just where you were born, where you grew up, what you do/study at Yale, any writing accomplishments)

2)       A paragraph or two for our “writers on writing” feature. These run the gamut, but basically we’re looking for something about your writing process, what inspired you to write this particular piece, what frustrates you about writing, anything. I can send you some example pieces by other authors if you’d like. We’re looking for probably 200-600 words.

Let me know if you’d be willing to do those for us! And feel free to e-mail or call if you have any questions at all. My contact info is below.

Thanks,

Allie [X]

Of course, more than anything, I was flattered and excited. But I was also confused. Not only was this entirely unsolicited; I also didn’t remember the column they asked about. It took a quick search back through my YDN author page to remind me which column they wanted to include: my very first, my “sample” column.

Permission wasn’t mine to give, but I knew who to ask. The editor-in-chief at the time sent me the YDN’s permission form. In exchange for $75, the YDN would happily let Bedford-St. Martin reprint the column. It was a go.

The Bedford Reader is a composition textbook used in college writing classes, and in many high schools. I was excited to be published, sure, but I was doubly excited because of a coincidence: The Bedford Reader was the textbook I used in my Advanced Placement Logic and Composition class in high school, which I took my senior year with the incomparable Dr. Herbert. Along with the possibility that a piece of mine would be published in that book came visions of future generations of Hunter students flipping through their Bedford Readers to the piece written by the alum—and prefaced with an author bio prominently mentioning Hunter College High School.

Allie and I exchanged emails over a few months. (I never found out whether she was an intern or a senior editor.) I wrote that author bio, she edited it down, I approved it.  I also wrote my “writers on writing” essay, which she returned comments on. She asked to change the title of the piece, shortening the eight-word headline to a one-word title: “Destroyed.” It was a bit dramatic for my taste, but I didn’t mind. Who was I to complain?

Then eight months went by. I hadn’t been in a hurry, since I knew that publishing a book takes time. But I remembered The Bedford Reader this January, a year after Allie first contacted me, and I thought it made sense to get in touch again. So I shot her a quick email asking about the status of the book and, as politely as I could, requesting a free “author’s” copy when the book came out. Two days later she wrote back to say the book should be released that month, and that of course she’s send me a copy.

The book arrived at my parents’ apartment in March. I didn’t get to see the physical product until my mom came to visit me last month. But to let me enjoy it before then, my dad scanned some pages and sent them to me.

I’m happy now to share those with everyone (at risk of violating Bedford-St. Martin’s copyright; I hope they won’t mind my reproducing my contribution to “friends and family”). By clicking here, you can download a medium-quality PDF of my piece, including the column, my bio, my “writers on writing” essay, and the endlessly amusing response questions the Bedford-St. Martin’s editors wrote about the column. And by clicking here, you can see the book’s table of contents, which proves what I still can’t believe: I’ve now been published in a collection with such giants of journalism, literature, and history as David Sedaris, Joan Didion, John Updike, Maya Angelou, David Foster Wallace, Dave Barry, Joyce Carol Oates, Amy Tan, Annie Dillard, Anna Quindlen, Michael Pollan, Barbara Ehrenreich, Francine Prose, Barbara Kingsolver, Katha Pollitt, Shirley Jackson, George Orwell, Edward Said, Martin Luther King, E.B. White, and Jonathan Swift.

To all my past writing teachers (including friends and family members), to all the authors I have read, to my editors at the YDN and the Globalist and elsewhere, and to Allie at Bedford-St. Martin, thanks for making this small pleasure a reality. It truly is small, but it is still a delightful first step on the road to, I hope, more such pleasures.

Obviously I’ve haven’t been writing lies. I’ve believed the veracity of the words I’ve written (which have, of course, come directly from thoughts in my head). But when I’ve looked at those words on the screen, they’ve looked hollow. They’ve looked like they’re not worth reading. Not worth sharing.

Those of you who know me know this is not like me. I can’t remember any time when I regularly held my tongue, and until recently I had never had trouble sharing my thoughts, experiences, or opinions in writing either. Nor have I even recently been reluctant to share these thoughts with friends, or to share them more widely, publicly, in short doses. I’ve been emailing as furiously as I ever have, giving my friends, as always, as many words as I have in my head. And I’ve been using Twitter and Google Buzz more than before. I’ve not gone dark. Except on this site.

I don’t know what this is all about. I have some theories. For whatever reason, the first person, when it refers to me and is shared more widely than I can know, turns me off. In emails, I choose the recipients; on Twitter and Buzz, I know who is following me. Therefore I don’t seem to mind writing “I” there. But here, where anyone can read—even though few currently do, fewer by far than follow me on those sites—”I” scares me, even sickens me. It’s a wonder I got through this paragraph.

At the end of April, on the Yale Daily News‘ final publication date of the year, a friend emailed to me to say how much she loved the opinion page that day. I found her in the coffee shop where she said she was reading. I read the page there with her. I agreed that its columns were quite good. And I told her, sheepishly, that I didn’t regularly read the YDN, or its opinion page, this year. My disinterest was bad, I felt, because I had invested a whole year into making that page good, and all I had wanted at that time was for people to read it. This year even I didn’t do that. So it goes.

Later that day, I had more thoughts than whatever I had shared with her at the coffee shop. So I wrote back to her:

I’m reading this today and I realized earlier that I think part of why I don’t read the opinion page much anymore is that I’m really burned out on the first person. I don’t know whether that’s a result of editing four first-person pieces a night every night last year, or whether it’s from things I’ve been exposed to this year (or both), but I just find it really hard to get into first-person accounts, stories people tell about themselves, anymore, even in books. Maybe (hopefully) that’ll change.

I won’t explain here and now all the “things I’ve been exposed to this year” in a coherent way. Maybe soon I’ll try to get into that. I’ll end this post less ambitiously, hinting at the point of all this with with a few experience that may seem connected to no one but me.

My best friend spent five months fighting cancer—and, as much, fighting the drugs and surgeries that were fighting his cancer too. Meanwhile, he wrote “a collection of musings on life.” He wrote beautifully and powerfully and spoke meaningfully to hundreds of people. For some reason, his blog was a definite exception to my resistance to the first person.

In the fall I took a course on J.M. Coetzee, in which we read each of his novels. Coetzee’s books repeatedly challenge common notions of authorial control, suggesting that for an author to create characters, to ascribe thoughts and emotions and actions to other people—even fictional people, even himself, in writing—may be a form of abuse, a violation. Coetzee’s most recent installment of his memoirs, Summertime, treats the author’s life in the third person, and re-imagines the years 1972 to 1975 in high fiction: as if Coetzee weren’t married; as if he didn’t have young children; as if he lived with his father; as if his mother were dead.

I graduated college. Applied to a few jobs. Moved back home for the summer. Began thinking about the future.

I wrote a senior essay. I spent several months researching before writing the paper, which at the end comprised 40 pages of text, several pages of graphs, and a dozen pages of bibliographic citations.

I read a number of books that immediately struck me as significant parts of my coming of age, my growth into adulthood. Most recently from this list I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I learned that Malcolm read up to 15 hours a day, every day, for the years he was in prison. He just read and read books. Then he got out and became Malcolm X.

I’ve thought some about reading and writing in a directed way. Now that I’m done with my schooling, I’ve thought, I can begin my education. It’s a corny play on words, but the idea is seriously truthful. I can now read what I want and write what I want, and it’s on me to make it happen. At the beginning of the school year, I told some friends I had a new motto for the year: Whatever happens happens, but it’s gotta happen. They laughed at me.

I’ve had some thoughts about what I’d want to write. On my more creative, ambitious days, I’ve thought through ideas for fictional stories. The rest of the time I’ve tried to figure out what I might try to say that falls under non-fiction and doesn’t use the first person, since, after all, I now hate the first person, at least when “I” means me. (It really is astonishing that this post is still going, that I’m going to click “Publish” in a moment. I haven’t been able to do this in months.)

I went to the toilet the other day, and grabbed one of my favorite books, just to skim and smile at and be entertained by for a few minutes. I opened the book. There, on the page following the dedication and preceding the table of contents, I read, for maybe the eighth or tenth time, a few sentences that might as well be all the books in the world:

Nothing in this book is true.

“Live by the foma* that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.”

The Books of Bokonon. I: 5

*Harmless untruths

If I wrap this up by saying, “Everything I could ever say, Kurt Vonnegut has already said in Cat’s Cradle (or maybe in one of his other books),” it would seem like the point of all this is to say that Kurt Vonnegut is the man. He is, and more. But that’s not the point. (I only read the sentences above a few days ago. I’ve had most of these thoughts in my head for months.)

I’m not sure how to end this, then. I have to tell whoever is reading to read Cat’s Cradle. If there’s one thing to take away from this post, that’s it. The real wisdom is in there.

But also re-read the quote above. Before the book’s story, before everything else I wrote here, I think the words in that quote are the point. Did I need to write all this other stuff to draw attention to that? Maybe not. Maybe that’s why I haven’t been writing in recent months. Whenever I write, I found that Kurt Vonnegut has said my thoughts already. That’s funny, and heartening. And a challenge.

But I can’t just quote Kurt Vonnegut. So next time I won’t. But keep the foma in mind. Nothing in this post is true. More from me later.

David wrote this great article, one of the most fun and awesome articles I’ve ever read—without limiting the field to articles by friends, articles in college papers, or even sports articles. The one assist he was given was a great story to cover. But anyone could have covered the story; he told it masterfully. For those not yet racing to read the piece, here’s a brief excerpt that shows how graceful and fun David’s narrative is:

Indeed, the commentators from WIP 610, the sponsor of Wing Bowl, decried his audacity. If he puked, he would lose everything — his breakfast (oatmeal, downed circa 3 a.m.), his crown and the Ford F150 that he had all but secured.

But at an event that embodies the seven deadly sins, pride lurks dangerously in the wings. And Squibb, who got his start in competitive eating after a bet with a friend, was on the precipice of history.

And Raf has entered the blogosphere, writing deep thoughts, brief remarks, jokes, and about his experience undergoing chemotherapy. If you’re looking for new blogs to follow, this should make your list.

I love these guys, and I love their writing. I am very proud of them.

Now I’ve got a break for the next month. I went to the Met with my dad this weekend, just to walk around and chat. Since then I’ve been seeing friends, reading, trying to write. I’ve got no schedule, no deadlines or timelines until late August. I used to live like this all the time; now I’m recapturing something quaint–free time–holding on to it and treating it almost like a guilty pleasure

I know this feeling, if not the specifics:

I can’t go to the Met without getting this overpowering feeling that I’ve wiled away too much of my brief life. You look at the Burghers and wonder how much care that took. How hard he must have worked. And you wonder if you’ll ever be so fortunate as to work that hard at anything. I got up at three this morning and worked on some writing about DOOM. I have been up ever since.

I don’t plan on wiling away any more of my life. Really, that period is over. I once regretted not pushing myself harder. Now laziness and boredom are in the permanent past. But when and where does happiness–calm, spontaneous, unexpected–fit in to life led under gun or deadline? Maybe question is what this month is about.

The whole post excerpted and linked above is A-plus. I trust I’m not the only one it speaks to. Day in, day out, TNC is great, but that post is the best of the man. It’s the best of blogging.

Update 7/30/09: Walking along the Mall in D.C. earlier this week, I spotted hands that looked familiar. They were the Burghers’, displayed at at the Hirshhorn Museum’s sculpture garden. I entered the garden and walked around the statue a couple times, not moved the way TNC had been by the cast at the Met, but still very impressed, captivated even for a couple minutes before I had to move on.

A few other, similarly pithy and equally valuable lessons have come my way via my peers. One of the three great editors I have worked under at The Yale Globalist once educated me: “Most of what people call ‘their style’ is actually just bad writing.” When Sean told me that, early in my sophomore year, it both gave me confidence to be a forceful editor and the humility to let others modify my manuscripts. My “style,” I quickly internalized, was not special, nor so clever it should override established rules of clear and concise writing. I’ve since shared that lesson with other Globalist editors, and I’ve applied it to many writers. No writer successful defends against my editing pen by saying something is “her style.”

But the lesson is not as dramatic as Sean conveyed it, or as I once understood it. Some elements of personal style do little but obscure clarity or add unnecessary length. Many others, however, add flair and capture readers, even if the unorthodox additions are objectively unnecessary or even against the rules. I came this see this middle ground over my year of daily editing at the Yale Daily News, and I tried to reach a balance between style and objectively “good” writing in most of the pieces I edited in the spring.

It became easy for me to edit by default: I’d strip unnecessary words (“in order to” became “to” every time, etc.), tighten up meandering sentences, bring arguments to the front, and encourage writers to make their points with as much force as comfort allowed. A lot of editing, especially when I didn’t slow down to think, was almost mathematical. I did a lot of subtraction, and I cut out nuance that didn’t have an obvious point. Most of the time, I think I improved pieces. But I was concerned that sometimes I was not improving pieces as much as I was making them uniform, just more like each other, and more like how I would have written them.

My struggle (which has to be a common struggle among editors) is illustrated colorfully, though not purposefully, in this feature in Vanity Fair. The magazine’s editors have taken their pens to Sarah Palin’s disastrous resignation speech, correcting errors of grammar, punctuation, and fact. But they’ve also done a lot of what I did to columns I edited: They’ve stripped sentences down to the fewest words necessary, and they’ve removed all the personal quirks of Palin’s speech that lend it character, that make it her speech and not anybody else’s. The nonsense she spews is painful to listen to and more so to read, but need it be removed entirely? I’m not sure. Only now that I see the speech edited do I think maybe there was a reason to give it in original form.

Update 8/4/09: This Slate piece by a grammarian, which I just refound in my bookmarks, shows how Sarah Palin’s sentences are complete, nearly indecipherable nonsense. Here’s a taste: “To me, [her speech is] not English—it’s a collection of words strung together to elicit a reaction, floating ands and prepositional phrases (“with that vote of the American people”) be damned. It requires not a diagram but a selection of push buttons.”

The first things I see are two half-eaten pizzas on card tables next to a sink. The sink and pizzas occupy a corner of the room, a studio apartment on the third floor of a walk-up. Filling the rest of the room are eight people at desks and three flat-screen TVs mounted on the long wall. There’s a couch and a rug and nothing else, not even on the walls. There’s no extra space; in fact, there’s barely an aisle between the desks. The room is bright enough thanks to rows of ceiling lights; only two small windows let natural light in at one end of the room. The door isn’t marked, but I can tell I’m in the right place. This is one of the best newsrooms in America.

Talking Points Memo didn’t exist ten years ago, and it is barely known around the country today. But in this 800-square-foot former apartment, a team of fewer than a dozen people has built up a unique news organization that has become a leader in investigative reporting. In the last three years, TPM has discovered stories that have made headlines and influenced politics across the nation, but which traditional media outfits couldn’t see before TPM shined light in the right places. What was once a personal blog has grown into an admired news source thanks to its visionary founder, its hard-working reporters, and, perhaps most important, its devoted readers. TPM and its readers have worked together to compete with bigger and more established competitors, and the site won recognition by beating others to a story that changed the country. From the beginning, TPM has relied on its readers to be not only consumers, but also invaluable support for this small and young news organization that accepts help from all sources.

***

In November 2000, as election workers in Florida counted votes and the Supreme Court jumped in to stop the counting, freelance writer and journalist Josh Marshall started a blog. Blogging was a new type of work for him, but so it was for everyone at the time. He held a doctorate in American History from Brown and had worked for several years as a freelance writer before eventually becoming an editor at The American Prospect, a young biweekly magazine with liberal politics. TPM was Marshall’s work on the side, his way to vent about politics and publish pieces that didn’t make it into print.

As his readership grew and TPM began earning revenue through advertising, Marshall was able to stop freelancing and focus entirely on blogging. For five years, Marshall worked by himself. He both blogged and managed the site, taking care of technological work and business on his own. Along the way there were signs TPM was growing. In early 2004 Marshall asked readers to fund a trip to New Hampshire, where he would cover the presidential primaries. Four thousand dollars poured in through donations and Marshall quickly had to ask readers to stop sending money. The next year, he used the same method to expand his site for the first time.

Marshall added two blogs to the TPM franchise in 2005, taking the first steps toward TPM Media, the company that exists today. He invited guest bloggers and hired his first reporters to create TPMCafé and TPMMuckraker. Café was to be a community blog with many authors, while Muckraker was an attempt—perhaps the first attempt—to do online what newspapers had done so well decades ago: expose malfeasance by government and business, the news that those in power would like to remain hidden but which good journalists found ways to uncover.

At first, Marshall wanted to investigate Randy “Duke” Cunningham, a California congressman who was facing corruption charges. To staff Muckraker, Marshall once again asked readers for donations. “We’re going to launch a new blog dedicated to chronicling, explaining and reporting on the interconnected web of public corruption scandals bubbling up out of the reigning Washington political machine,” he wrote on the blog on the first day of its sixth year online. “What are we raising the money for? Simple. Salaries. … We want to hire one and hopefully two full-time reporter-bloggers to dig into [the Duke Cunningham] story, explain recent press reportage and distill it, work sources on Capitol Hill and around Washington, and report on it every day exclusively for you.”

Within three hours, 140 readers had contributed. Marshall ended the fundraiser a month later, after 2,500 contributions and many posts reminding readers of the new site he wanted to build. Over the next couple months, Marshall found an office for TPM and hired two reporters. His first hires, young men named Paul Kiel and Justin Rood, began sorting through the congressman’s dealings, as well as other stories Marshall had not had time to investigate. Marshall’s posts on the main page regarding Cunningham were moved to Muckraker, where Kiel and Rood updated the story as they learned more. Their reports happened in real time, and they would often post multiple times a day. For several months, Cunningham, along with corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff, was Muckraker’s singular focus.

Muckraker came into being thanks to the generosity of TPM readers. But their help didn’t end there. From TPM’s new office in New York’s Flower District, the journalists at Muckraker could report on the story, but they needed local eyes and ears from around the country. So TPM turned to its readers.

***

TPM’s readership is not a cross section of the country. It is small (but growing), educated, affluent, and politically active. The site receives about 400,000 page hits each day and attracts over 750,000 unique visitors a month (most readers are very devoted, checking the site daily). Of those quarter-million readers, strong majorities have college degrees, make over $75,000 a year, and have donated to political candidates. They read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, or the Washington Post, as well as local papers. And then they check TPM. But only TPM asks them help report stories.

From the beginning, Marshall engaged readers to inform him as much as he tried to inform them, inviting readers to email him with comments, questions, and answers to questions he posted on the blog. The first time he did so, only a month into the site’s existence, he began informally. “Let me see if I understand this,” he wrote, outlining details of Florida’s voting mess and adding at the end, “Am I missing something?” In a post a few days later, he acknowledged a reader’s help for the first time. “P.S. A special TPM shout-out to the Pointster who passed this info along,” he wrote. Several months later Marshall began quoting readers directly, citing them by their initials. Now, eight years later, reader emails make their way to the front page almost every day.

Since Muckraker’s founding, readers have been actively solicited to send tips to the site. From around the country, readers call TPM’s attention to important stories that haven’t surfaced in the national media. They send 100 to 200 emails a day with tips on news stories that may not be receiving enough attention, says Kiel, who is now deputy editor, the number two under Marshall. Of those, only several each week are good tips. But the most interesting ones make it to the front page, along with a note of gratitude: “Special thanks to TPM reader AZ for the tip.”

Some tips are very good. The best ones let TPM bring a new story to national attention, even to the level of scandal. “A number of stories have come from reader tips,” Kiel says. “One big one was a spin-off of the Abramoff scandal based on a house that had been sold at a loss to a congressman. The congressman, Jim Ryun of Kansas, lost his reelection bid because of it.” In the final post on Ryun shortly after the election, reporter Justin Rood summed up TPM’s work on the story and acknowledged how the site came to it: “Back in April, Paul [Kiel] broke the story of the strange house deal between Ryun and the DeLay/Abramoff-connected sham charity, U.S. Family Network. … A belated but heartfelt tip of the hat to Reader GY, who alerted me to this.”

Alerted to a trend it would not have thought to investigate, TPM quickly honed in on the developing stories. Over the next few weeks, local stories came in from New Mexico and Minnesota. The articles were too similar to be a coincidence: in what looked like a pattern, the Justice Department had fired attorneys involved in political trials. Local papers reported briefly on the events, then never followed up. National papers, with the resources to uncover such stories, did not detect the pattern of events occurring across the country. With the help of alert readers, Marshall did notice the pattern, and Muckraker had a story to cover.

***

The blogosphere buzzed in February when it was announced that one of its own had won a George Polk Award. The Polk Awards are respected but perhaps underappreciated acknowledgements of valuable journalism. Writing about TPM’s win, one bloggerdescribed the Polk as “the Golden Globe of journalism”: good on the resume, good on the ego, but always second fiddle to the Oscar—or, in this case, the Pulitzer. No matter to TPM: the Polk was a taste of recognition that the site, and all online media, had yet to receive. It was the first Polk Award ever given to an online news organization.

The award recognized the work TPM had done to break the U.S. Attorneys scandal during the first half of 2007. “Noting a similarity between firings in Arkansas and California, Marshall and his staff (with his staff reporter-bloggers Paul Kiel and Justin Rood) connected the dots and found a pattern of federal prosecutors being forced from office for failing to do the Bush Administration’s bidding,” the award description read. “Marshall’s tenacious investigative reporting sparked interest by the traditional news media and led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.” The story, and the accomplishment, was not a small one.

TPM was not the first news organization to prompt the resignation of a major government figure. And Gonzales wasn’t even the first such figure TPM helped bring down. Five years earlier, when Marshall ran the site by himself, he drew attention to offensive remarks Trent Lott made at Strom Thurmond’s one-hundredth birthday party. When the national media picked up the story, thanks in part to TPM’s coverage online, Lott stepped down as Senate Majority Leader. And, a couple years later, TPM reported that Valerie Plame had been outed as a CIA agent eight days before the New York Times did, helping spark a story that eventually led to a federal investigation and the conviction of I. Lewis Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff.

But the U.S. Attorney investigation was innovative and showed the first success of a new style of investigative journalism. TPM relied on the help of its readers to uncover the story from the beginning, eschewing the top-down approach of traditional journalism. TPM not only alerted readers to the firing of United States Attorneys in several states, but it also asked them to help dig up more information. The site ignored the traditional roles of reporter, source, and reader. Instead, readers helped with everything. They acted as sources and even as reporters at times, relaying news developments to the site’s staff and reading through documents posted online. Over several months, TPM’s reporters worked with their readers to investigate the story, breaking the story over time as they uncovered more.

***

Many newspapers and magazines are so inaccessible to reader input that they are said to have a “firewall” between them and their audience. Some are famous for maintaining an impenetrable front to preserve the mystique and prestige of their production. TPM takes the opposite approach.

By their nature, blogs are interactive. They function best with reader feedback, and they achieve success with regular posts developing stories over time. But few blogs do the investigative work that TPM does, and few have original stories to break, as TPM has had. By posting details it discovers as a story develops, TPM runs the risk of being scooped by any other publication with better connections or faster researchers. This is a risk the site not only accepts, but also embraces. Rather than being upset that other publications have picked up on TPM’s work to get headline stories, the site’s staff is glad to bring stories to light. “I’m most proud of leading stories that were picked up widely, like our investigation into the civil rights division of the Department of Justice,” Kiel says.

Of course, TPM’s most famous scoop was breaking other activity at the Justice Department. When the department fired several U.S. Attorneys in a political purge, TPM was ready to turn the story into a scandal.

On January 12 of last year, the San Diego Union-Tribune published a story about the city’s U.S. Attorney, who had recently been asked to step down from her position after prosecuting Duke Cunningham, the corrupt congressman from the area. Immediately aware of the story’s potential importance, TPM linked to the story on the Union-Tribune’s website at 11:08 that morning, along with a note: “We’ll have more of this.” The site updated the story as news came out over the next few days. Marshall also invited readers to weigh in with information and insight of their own, and they did.

The first reader email about the story that was posted on the blog came seven days later, when Marshall quoted reader JO’s legal analysis of a law change that allowed the president to replace U.S. Attorneys without oversight. “Before they changed the statute, the President had no effective way to put a political stooge in as US Attorney for more than 4 months without buy-in from another branch of government … But now he can,” the email read. On this and other occasions, TPM allowed readers to speak for themselves, providing the context and analysis that traditional outfits would have produced themselves. Along the way, readers built the case for scandal as much as the site’s reporters did.

Over the next few months, as TPM’s reporters investigated the story, they kept coming back to readers for help. When the Justice Department dumped three thousand pages of documents relating to the firings last March, TPM posted them on the site, inviting readers to comb through them. “We asked readers to help us with documents coming out, since they were so well-versed in the scandal,” Kiel says. Within days, hundreds of readers had posted on an open index of the documents, scouring and organizing them more quickly and thoroughly than almost any news organizations could. And, of course, they did so for free. A couple days later, Marshall posted a note on the project’s success: “We’ve been combing reader postings as fast as we can on the emails released by the Justice Department last night. Some gems: Ousted U.S. Attorney David Iglesias was lauded as a ‘diverse up- and-comer’ in 2004. Rove’s former aide was apparently a party to the scheme to have him installed as the U.S. attorney without Senate confirmation. And the documents actually show DoJ officials brainstorming on the reasons that they’d fired the USAs. Hindsight’s 20/20!”

TPM’s investigation into the firing was the first notable case of crowd sourcing as investigative reporting, and it was more successful than anyone—or at least anyone outside TPM—could have imagined. The site not only accepted tips from readers, as traditional news organizations have done for decades; instead, the site’s reporters actively sought help from readers, unafraid to expose a story at any stage in order to get assistance at every stage. In the end, the site had found a story that was otherwise invisible to the narrowly focused newsrooms of traditional media organizations by digging for information where others weren’t, by pushing a story that others didn’t have, and by using resources that others hadn’t thought to use. The collaborative process between reporters and readers that led TPM to the story was a result of the philosophy that TPM has relied on since the beginning.

***

Blogs draw fire from a lot of angles, and for a lot of reasons. Their success attracting readers is often derided by print journalists, many of whom see online media as a new enemy, unworthy competition in an increasingly hostile environment. But not all blogs are the same. And TPM is not like most other blogs.

TPM has succeeded at distancing itself from other blogs that receive the scorn of traditional journalists. Criticism of TPM, inevitable from some print journalists, has been tempered by admiration since the resolution of the U.S. Attorney scandal. Jay Carney, who writes for TIME’s Washington blog Swampland, initially claimed TPM was full of “liberals are seeing broad partisan conspiracies where none likely exist” by investigating the firings. He later admitted he had judged TPM poorly. “My hat is off. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo and everyone else out there whose instincts told them there was something deeply wrong and even sinister about the firings deserve tremendous credit,” he wrote on the blog.

Journalists who never felt hostility toward TPM have come to praise it profusely. “I don’t even think TPM is a blog,” says XX [Name redacted. The source spoke to me for the article when I wrote it for a class, and asked not to be quoted by name if the piece were ever to be published. For now I've left the quotes in, without named attribution], deputy web editor for The New Republic. “TPM is legitimate news-angle journalism, even with only a seven-person staff. They do great journalism. To me, ‘blog’ implies more commentary. They do that, too, but it’s differentiated from other blogs by being more a forward-thinking new type of journalistic enterprise.”

Peter Rothberg, the associate publisher for the website at The Nation—which, he points out, competes with TPM for readers—says TPM has combined he best of traditional journalism with the best of the internet. “I think TPM is better than most journalism—certainly better than online stuff, but even a lot of print. … TPM has very quickly developed a reputation as a legitimate news-gathering operation, coming out of personal blog. What they’ve shown is that you can do real investigative reporting online with an interactive audience, you don’t have to sling arrows or be snarky, you can do old-school muckraking on the internet using the tools of community journalism.”

Can TPM be a model for more such sites? Sure, says Rothberg. “There are local blogs mimicking the model, dealing with municipal issues around country, but no one else doing it on national scale. I hope they can inspire others.” XX agrees. “What they do is fantastic,” he says. “It’s the future, dude.” Ignored in the praise for TPM, however, is appreciation for the size and strength of the site’s unique audience.

“The key to this is to build up a reputation for credibility. We’ve worked for that to get a strong reader base,” Kiel argues. He says TPM may be an inspiration for other new news sites, but any new site will have to have the sustain success TPM has shown so far in order to attract valuable readers of its own. “There will be more examples of smaller newsrooms like ours,” he predicts. But, he warns, “There isn’t yet a career path in this.”

***

I thought the Polk Award might change the nature of business at TPM, but Kiel says it hasn’t. “It’s very gratifying, obviously. But I haven’t seen a change, just a lot of nice media coverage.”

Andrew Golis, the site’s deputy publisher, says TPM isn’t hoping to be something else than what it has been. “We couldn’t be like a traditional organization if we tried. We’re still sorting out what online media is going to look like. We want to be a pretty agile, online reporting operation.” That’s what TPM has always been, and that’s what it hopes to remain. It continues to welcome help from anywhere. TPM welcomes new help constantly. Interns are accepted on a rolling schedule, and reporters are added as necessary. The organization is currently advertising an open position, to be filled in New York or Washington. “The new hire will be one of two full-time reporter-bloggers for the site,” the position advertisement reads. “There is no deadline for applications. We’ll be hiring as soon as we find the right person.”

It’s all part of TPM’s philosophy, and part of the strategy that has brought the site success.

When I visit the office, as I sit on the couch waiting for Kiel to finish a phone call, I watch the reporters and interns working quietly around me. The intern in front of me is busy editing video with Final Cut software. After a minute he spins around in his chair to face me.

“First day?” he asks.

I tell him no, I don’t work here.

“Oh,” he responds. “I was going to teach you to Final Cut.”