Huffington Post Arianna talks about the wonderful power of blogs and it's effect on the mainstream media.
As this showed, breaking a big story isn't always about getting the inside tip from a Deep Throat -- many times it's simply the piecing together of seemingly random bits of information there for everybody to see. But when they are assembled together, suddenly a big story can emerge. The blogosphere excels at this. Besides taking pride in the excellent work of a fellow blogger, I relish that it is the work of Josh Marshall, whose efforts helped move the Trent Lott/Strom Thurmond story out of the shadows and into the media spotlight -- marking the moment when I first recognized the potential power of the blogosphere. It was the spark that lit my blogging fire, and eventually led me to HuffPost. Chomping down on a story and refusing to let go is what bloggers do best. And while the vast majority of material that ends up being blogged about still originates with a mainstream news source, more and more stories are being broken by online news sources -- a trend that will only continue with the growth of sites like TPM, Politico, TMZ (hey, the Mel Gibson and Michael Richards stories were big news), and HuffPost, where we are ratcheting up our commitment to original reporting, investigative reporting, and citizen journalism, in which our readers act as adjunct reporters -- additional eyes, ears, and boots, or stiletto heels, on the ground, ferreting out news and underreported stories all across the country. At the same time, technology will continue to give readers more and more control over what kind of information they get, and how that information will be presented. The days of publishing pooh-bahs dictating what is important and what is not are over. And thank goodness. Because the big question has always been: what page will today's real front page story actually appear on?