Deploying Research Assistants

Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo has won widespread praise for being ahead of the mainstream media on the Department of Justice's firing of selected United States Attorneys. Marshall struggles to stay on top of the story, especially with the challenge all media faced when the Department of Justice released 3000 relevant documents late yesterday. Quickly, the staff of the House Judiciary Committee scanned them onto the net as pdf documents.

Even so, how do you find your way through the thicket of documents. Marshall's solution? He commissioned TPM's readers to select a file, read through it and flag anything they found that seemed significant. Here's the result in comments of their work. Yes, of course it's messy. But it's a brilliant deployment of a blog's readers as research assistants that will keep Marshall on top of a story that is breaking this morning. No mainstream media reporter or staff of reporters in the country will have surmounted the"document dump" to know what's in it. Marshall will be closer to claiming that than anyone else.