THE New York Times boasts on its masthead that it contains “all the news that’s fit to print”, but the internet is challenging its pre-eminence as a provider of news and opinion in America.

A proliferating band of independent writers known as “bloggers” (short for web loggers) is pumping out personal takes on the news, and one of the most persistent themes of their websites has been that Howell Raines, executive editor of The New York Times, would have to resign or be sacked.

The bloggers got their man last week and have been exulting in their power. After a rollercoaster two years in the job, Raines resigned from The New York Times last Thursday along with Gerald Boyd, the managing editor.

“If this had happened 10 years ago, when the internet didn’t exist, Raines would still be running the place,” crowed Mickey Kaus, whose “blog” can be found on slate.com. The week before, his Howell Raines-O-Meter had put the chances that the editor would leave at 70%. Now it triumphantly announces: “Resigned”.

The catalyst for the downfall of a powerful editor who won seven Pulitzer prizes for his newspaper’s coverage of the September 11 attacks, was the flagrant dishonesty of one of his favourites, Jayson Blair, a young black reporter who plagiarised and made up stories.

The article that gave Blair the most amusement was his account of the reaction of the family of Jessica Lynch, an American prisoner of war in Iraq, to the news of her release. It was datelined Palestine, West Virginia, and described how her father “choked up as he stood on the porch here overlooking the tobacco fields and cattle pastures”.

“That was my favourite,” Blair mocked after he had been found out. “The description was so far off from reality. I just couldn’t stop laughing.”

He had written it all from his flat in Brooklyn. Blair admitted that he was “a total cokehead” and boasted that he had “fooled some of the most brilliant people in journalism”.

The biggest sucker was Raines, an autocrat who had chosen to shake up the staid so-called “Gray Lady” with a star system that put protégés on the fast track to top stories at the expense of more experienced and increasingly mutinous newsroom hands.

A liberal southerner, Raines made the explosive concession that he had probably given Blair a few too many chances because of his race. It was ammunition to right-wing critics, already angered by his hostility to the war in Iraq, who claimed that his politics were lowering the newspaper’s standards.

In a 7,200-word explication to readers, The New York Times set out in agonising detail how warnings from senior staff had gone unheeded while Blair’s lies mounted. In one instance, Blair had refused to contribute to the paper’s moving Portraits of Grief about the victims of the World Trade Center because, he claimed, he was grieving for a relative killed in the Pentagon. It was his way of avoiding a relatively lowly assignment.

One scandal led to another. Raines, a Pulitzer prize-winner in his own right for a memoir of his Alabama childhood, was an admirer of finely crafted, descriptive pieces. These were the speciality of Rick Bragg, another award-winner, who in one choice example described in lyrical detail the life of oystermen in Apalachicola, Florida.

Bragg had only briefly set foot in the town to justify the dateline: all the legwork had been done by a young freelance who received no credit for the story. After more turmoil, Bragg delivered his resignation.

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