This Michael Massing piece on blogging-as-journalism is truly spectacular, free of all of the lazy thinking about the parasitism of the blogosphere and also free from the triumphalism. The fact that Massing spends the most space on Marcy, HuffPost‘s Ryan Grim and ProPublica‘s Paul Kiel — three reporters who represent best-practices of how journalism works online — demonstrates his facility with the material he’s covering.

Everyone here already knows how great Marcy is, and Ryan has really shown what can be accomplished when a deep-in-the-weeds congressional reporter breaks free of a publication that doesn’t play to his strengths, which include comprehensiveness and explanatory capability. (And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention this insightful comment from Ezra: "Explanation has become more important than commentary." Right on.) But people: I still get the sense that you don’t know about Paul Kiel, and I learned from working with him at TPM that he’s one of the most no-nonsense, thorough and focused reporters out there. Unlike me, he has no axe to grind, and that’s a liberating thing. Do people here read enough Paul? I feel I don’t, largely because I don’t quite understand how ProPublica means for me to read his stuff.