My friend and former TPM colleague Greg Sargent is moving to the Washington Post. This is a great move for two related journalistic reasons. First, Greg isn’t moving into a print position, he’s moving to a new WashPost blog. That’s a big step: it recognizes that to run a good blog, it makes sense to hire good bloggers, rather than retraining and/or dual-tasking print reporters to reluctantly write stuff for online. What’s more, it’s a counterexample to the delusional idea that bloggers should "graduate" to print media when the future of journalism is an online future.

Second, it also recognizes that TPM — and not certain opinion magazines I could mention — is the feeder pool for the next wave of journalistic excellence, since it pioneered how to conduct substantive journalism for blogs. Look at where the TPM alumni have gone: Justin Rood is at ABC News, Paul Kiel is at ProPublica, Laura McGann and myself are at the Washington Independent, Matt Yglesias and Matt Corley are at ThinkProgress, Rachel Weiner is at the Huffington Post, Benjy Sarlin is at the Daily Beast, and now Greg is at the Washington Post. And not to cause any additional disturbances in the TPM fold, but if you run a video-based news organization, you are making a huge mistake by not writing Ben Craw a blank check. The work that guy puts in as TPM videographer is exceeded only by its quality.