Saradise Lost: How Alaska Bloggers Dethroned Sarah Palin

While she never said it out loud during her farewell press conference, it certainly wouldn't have been a shock if Palin had directed a Nixonian parting phrase toward Alaska bloggers: "You're not going to have Palin to kick around anymore."

I'm not suggesting that homegrown bloggers alone were responsible for Palin's "No más" moment, but there's no question that the online activists played a key role. That with their shit-kicking brand of frontier citizen journalism, they drove Palin to distraction and changed the way voters nationwide thought about the governor.

So if conservative bloggers get credit for driving Dan Rather out of the anchor chair in 2004 following their Memogate campaign-season tale, then the band of scrappy liberal bloggers in Alaska ought to be allowed to bask in a bit of glory, because they made their own history when Palin announced her exit.

Brandishing dogged reporting skills and wonderfully insightful, entertaining writing, Alaska bloggers turned the 49th state (and a very, very red one, at that) into a hotbed for plugged-in citizen journalism and showed the rest of the liberal blogosphere, as well as media elites, what's possible when passion and creativity are harnessed online.

Just ask Palin.

Read the entire Media Matters column here.