HOWZAT

It was a double blow to The New York Times’s prestige as the “newspaper of record”, but neither incident would have amounted to a hanging offence for the editor but for the barrage of criticism of Raines inside the paper and on the internet. The saga stopped being about the misdemeanours of a few reporters and became a power struggle over Raines between the new media and the old.

E-mails, magazine websites and blogs poured out gossip and venom against Raines at a speed that left the slow-footed, bureaucratic newspaper looking like a media dinosaur.

In the midst of the storm, Raines told staff at a crisis meeting that he had no intention of resigning: “My plan is to have this job and perform it with every fibre in my body.” Fatally for an editor, however, he lost control of his own story.

A website run by Jim Romenesko of the Poynter Institute, a respected journalism school, became the forum where staff vented their anger about the goings-on at the paper. Adam Clymer, one veteran political correspondent, was so dismayed by the open warfare that he sent an e-mail to colleagues begging them to “stop feeding this destructive monster”.

Some hope. With the click of a button, Clymer’s memo was leaked to the same site. “Several people told me they read me on Romenesko before they had opened my e-mail,” he said.

Where staff grumbling would once have been confined to the canteen, the disaffection was so widely known that Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher, who had vowed not to accept Raines’s resignation, ended up pointing him towards the exit.

As Raines made his farewell speech to staff, some reporters sobbed — out of pity for him, horror at the humiliation for the paper and shame at the role that their own friends and colleagues had played in his ousting.

“I’m sad,” said Clymer. “Howell is a great journalist and a great friend. I wish it hadn’t come to this.” Yet he admitted that Raines had become isolated. “If he had had a large measure of support, that would have been reflected on the internet as well. People would have said, ‘He screwed up here, but remember the other great things that he did’.”

The “screw-ups” were obsessively tracked by bloggers. Like British tabloid newspapers in hot pursuit of a wounded politician, they never gave up on their quarry.

The paper was pilloried for distorting polls on President George W Bush and for running the most doom-laden stories it could find on the war in Iraq. From the claim that Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, was against the war (his position was more nuanced) to revelations of a financial link between a columnist and Enron, the collapsed energy company, no subject was too large or too small for their notice.

Their latest target is Maureen Dowd, a star writer who jeered at Bush for claiming that Al-Qaeda was “not a problem any more” and has yet to acknowledge that she played fast and loose with his words.

One of the most influential blogs is written by Andrew Sullivan, the Sunday Times columnist who is based in Washington. Long before the Blair scandal, his website andrewsullivan.com, which receives 500,000 hits a month, was blasting Raines for bending the news to fit his liberal political agenda. Before him, sites such as smartertimes.com kept a watch on the paper and others, such as Kausfiles and Instapundit, jumped in.

“The New York Times used to be so powerful that anybody who was a professional journalist was leery of taking it on,” said Sullivan.

“For the first time you could have sustained criticism of the paper and people working for it began to send us the latest dope. The blogs created a narrative which was ‘Howell Raines’s reign of terror’ and that defined the way in which the Jayson Blair affair was interpreted.”

The first indication of the rival power of the net came when Matt Drudge published the story of Monica Lewinsky’s trysts with former president Bill Clinton on his website drudgereport.com after Newsweek magazine chose not to publish its own scoop about the relationship.

The attacks on The New York Times have added to the suspicion among Democrats that internet pundits are part of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” once alleged by Hillary Clinton. The right is certainly gloating over the newspaper’s discomfiture. According to Kaus, a Democrat, “the blogosphere does tend to skew to the right, though not as badly as radio”.

Nevertheless, the clearest example of the bloggers’ ability to take scalps was the forced resignation of Trent Lott, the Republican Senate leader, after he was vilified for making a racist remark at a southern politician’s 100th birthday celebration last year.

Only when left-wing bloggers began to make a fuss did newspapers such as The New York Times begin to notice that anything was amiss. Eventually Lott was shunned by the left and the right, including Bush.

Raines’s departure is allowing bloggers to indulge in further self-congratulation. The internet’s new breed of media commentators is already savouring its potential impact on the 2004 presidential race.

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