During a recent visit to TPM’s office, on West 20th Street in Manhattan, the place seemed eerily quiet as a dozen or so young reporters, writers, and “aggregators” (who link to other Web sites) peered intently at their computer screens. Marshall, a poker-faced forty-year-old, told me that he spends much of each work day reading through reader e-mails.
“Relative to size, the volume of quality e-mails we get is an order of magnitude greater than either The New York Times or The Washington Post,” he said. It allows us to do more than even a newspaper can. Political reporters have good sources, but they tend to be professional sources, who are used to picking up the phone and giving tips to reporters. We’re into a whole class of people who are not acculturated to the world of political journalism. If something happens in Kansas, I’ll hear about it.
” The News About the Internet - The New York Review of Books