Blogger of the year: Josh Marshall

The Week Magazine convened a whole herd of big-wigs in New York today to celebrate opinion journalism.

Josh Marshall was honored as “Blogger of the Year,” reports Jeff Jarvis, who was there and helped, along with Glenn Reynolds and Daniel Radosh, to select the winning blogger.

The crowd included Tina Brown, Abe Rosenthal, Mario Cuomo, Jim Hoge, Elizabeth Spiers, Thomas Friedman, Paul Krugman, Edward Epstein, Harry Evans, Vartan Gregorian… and if I understand correctly, Susan Cheever, Robert Caro, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Lani Guinier, Edward Rollins, Wendy Wasserstein, Steven Ratner, Walter Isaacson, Alex Jones, Lauren Hutton…

Here’s the citation for Marshall:

Joshua Micah Marshall, author of TalkingPointsMemo.com, represents the best of the Internet’s new medium of opinion, the weblog.

Weblogs ‘ personal journals with links and commentary ‘ have quickly moved from the fringes of political discourse into the mainstream. On his well-red, well-regarded political blog, the Washington-based Marshall (also a writer for Washington Monthly and a Ph.D in American history) is best known for tenaciously dogging the story of then-Majority Leader Trent Lott’s racial indiscretion at Strom Thurmond’s retirement — a story the big media outlets had largely ignored. Marshall, a liberal in a medium better known for its conservative and libertarian voices, has also aggressively covered the Bush administration’s strategy.

Marshall calls himself an opinion journalist, but he is also an accomplished reporter. He snared one of the first exclusive interviews with Democratic presidential hopeful Wesley Clark, for instance. Marshall recently asked his online readers whether he should report from the New Hampshire primary; in less than a day, the audience pledged enough to pay for his trip, and Marshall decided to report for them, rather than for print. ‘I’m much more invested in my Web site than in any of those other things that pay me,’ he said recently.

But Marshall is also making his Web site pay. He has received advertising from one presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry, and from a gun-control advocacy group. Why are they advertising? Because Weblogs ‘ and Marshall’s weblog in particular ‘ are where the influential reach the influential. They matter.

Josh, ever the mensch, said “I’d like to thank you not so much for choosing me but for choosing bloggers.”

If you want to beat Tina Brown to ordering a Blogad to start influencing influercers, here’s Josh Marshall’s ad order form.