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Monday 17 November 2008

The open secret of what Stone did is that anyone can do it. This fact is catnip to bloggers and anathema to career journalists who want to believe that what they do is a specialized skill that sets them apart from the amateur commoners. What’s much more important, though, is that hardly anybody does anything remotely like what Stone did, because what he did was hard work. When Stone went his own way, he had what he’d learned about the journalistic trade to guide him in his search for the news that others had missed; it helped that he knew what kinds of important stories publishers aren’t that interested in, but he could have probably developed a similar set of instincts just from two or three decades of reading the papers and shaking his fist from time to time. There’s nothing magical about the Internet, just as there was never anything magical about hard copy. If someone as smart and dedicated as I. F. Stone wanted to do what he did today, he could do it on-line or he could launch his own newsletter, and there’s no reason that it wouldn’t soon feel as if it were as essential to our times as the Weekly was to its times. But he couldn’t do it at at The New York Times or The Washington Post, because, now as then, those institutions are not interested in funding someone whose specialty is in highlighting the areas where they haven’t done their jobs. Phil Nugent

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