I.F. Stone: Stone's biographer names the traits that let this 44-year-old out-of-work journalist re-invent himself. He's often called "the first blogger." An I.F. Stone biographer addressed the current drama in modern American journalism by analyzing what famed and independent reporter, I.F. Stone, would offer by way of advice:

Don't give it away for free.
Embrace technology.

Those insights came in an LA Times op-ed by the biographer, positioning his subject to speak to what ails us now:

The truth of I.F. Stone

An excerpt:

Stone once said, "you can be a pet and a sucker for the establishment. Or you can be a heretic and a maverick."

Finally -- as unlikely as it seems -- he embraced technology. Though old school when it came to matters such as the 1st Amendment or the importance of clean copy ("Typos," Stone once told his daughter, "are worse than fascism"), Stone couldn't have written "The Trial of Socrates," the work of ancient Athenian muckraking that put him on the bestseller list for the first time at the age of 80, without the aid of an early Apple computer whose 24-point type he could just about make out.

Washington Post vs. Huffington Post

This also caught my eye on the Sunday news shows. Nico Pitney, the Huffington Post blogger with the Ahmadinejad question at the Obama press conference, vs. Dana Milbank of the Washington Post. See the exchange between the two from the CNN Video

Here is Dana Milbank's column chastising the White House and the blogger for a set-up question. Here's The New York Times The Caucus blog, arguing that the question was independent, but a phone call alert the night before broke accepted norms.