My sister at FishBowlNY got to chat with Frank Rich, who recently returned to the NYT op-ed page.

It's interesting to hear Rich, stalwart of the MSM, wax on about the possibilities of blogs (for God's sake, man! You're behind the TimesSelect wall!). He's getting excited about war blogging ("Can they do the kind of blogging in a war zone that the conventional media, with all its resources, can't do?"), how bloggers tackle investigative reporting as a group, picking up Zeitgeisty threads as in Rathergate (though "getting to the bottom of where Bush actually WAS during his guard service" has been another thing entirely); and whether the blogging form lends itself to cumulative investigative stories, like Enron ("What do you do when you get to the place that doesn't involve documents at all? With something like Enron the only way you're going to find out is by talking to this person and that person, and then talking to them again"). It's hardly surprising that this should fascinate Rich, given his beat: making sense of the new Beltway revelations each week, trying to parse out truth from spin. It will be the focus of his current book -- "a narrative bout post 9/11 America" -- for which he has just begun leave from the op-ed page (with Ted Koppel stepping into the breach). I tell him how much I enjoy his column, sincerely. "It's very truthy," I say. He laughs. "What more can I ask?"

More here.