I got distracted by the cute babies, but the reason I was going to Choire Sicha's site was because he picked up on something I noticed a few weeks back: 'tis the season to trot out Pulitzer contenders, but the web buzz just isn't there. Is this the equivalent of Oscar lauding "In The Bedroom" even though everyone's buying tickets for "40-Year Old Virgin?" I mention below how surprised I was that the massive NYT Magazine cover story on the tsunami was so ignored; Sicha is amazed that Kurt Eichenwald's huge investigative piece on internet child pornography hasn't made more of a splash in the blogosphere:

I can't believe this NYT webcam teen porn ring story is being met with such a resounding silence on the web. It's an amazing story on a lot of levels, not least of which is the interventionist nature of the journalism. But when a paper pulls out its Pulitzer-candy and the internets shrug? Weird.

I'm trying to think of any recent big investigative story that has gotten attention recently (one that doesn't have anything to do with illegal wiretapping, abuse of executive power or newspapers holding stories by writers with pending book releases). The Times' series on "Class in America" this summer, that definitely made some ripples, but it didn't set the blogosphere aflame like other topics. Hm. I have no answers here, only shared observations with Sicha.

Even if the Eichenwald story hasn't taken off "on the internets," it certainly has not escaped notice -- or criticism, especially for the interventionist elements of it. Over at Slate, media critic Jack Shafer takes issue with Eichenwald's active participation in the story, wondering about the slippery-slope precedent it might set for future investigations. The article is interesting (though I agree with Eichenwald that any decision made about how to deal with Justin -- leave him impartially alone or help him -- would have been met with criticism; and regular Fishbowl readers will not be surprised that I fall on the "help him" side of the debate). The best part of this column, though, is the frank back-and-forth email exchange between Shafer and Eichenwald, in which they debate the journalistic ethics of how Eichenwald and the NYT proceeded, and Shafer wonders about how much we can trust a reporter who is so invested in his story. Definitely worth a read. Go do it now. Come on, you can't convince me that you're working.

The New York Times Legal Aid Society [Slate]
Blue Velvet Times 10 [Choire Sicha]*

Related:
Are We Not Citizens? [BuzzMachine]**

*I have no idea what this headline means.
**Chanukah-appropriate headline!