From Newsday, an analysis of how the Times has been brought down to earth by the Internet and blogs:
Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, said that at the Times, “nobody had a very good explanation why those who helped Bragg report aren’t bylined in the story. It’s sort of institutional confusion.” Rosen said that more broadly, the traditional acceptance of authority in newspapers is coming under greater question in the Internet age. “Bragg is probably kind of an arbitrary victim of that,” he said. “For a long time journalists haven’t had to explain very much how they do things,” Rosen said. “The Internet has created the expectation that news organizations can be interacted with, can be questioned.”
Imagine that. News organizations questioned. Next up, we’ll be demanding that Howell Raines actually talk to the press! My only quibble with Rosen is his notion that Bragg is an “arbitrary” victim. Far from it. He was a slipshod crony waiting to be exposed. The scandal is not that it happened. But that for so long, he went unexamined.
The Dish 