If you’re trying to understand how blogs influence the mainstream media, here’s a case study that you can really wrap your brain around.

My friend David “Goldy” Goldstein, who writes probably the best liberal blog in Washington state, broke a big piece of the post-Katrina story — how FEMA Director Mike Brown’s previous employement record was… well, a bit spotty.

David recounts how his story leapt from a “small” blog to national blogs and thence to major media outlets in 48 hours.

Truth is, I didn�t really even know what I had. I rarely cross-post to Daily Kos, but since this was a national issue, and I was angry, I thought, what the hell. My original headline was a profane rant, and the first few comments insisted that this was too important a diary to be lost due to a non-descriptive headline. I followed their advice, changed the headline, went to bed� and awoke the next morning to find the story featured on Kos, and the traffic flooding in. Then the calls and emails from the MSM started coming, and I knew we were going to move headlines.

So if any of you out there believe that you cannot make a difference, let this be lesson to the contrary. A single email from a horse breeder to the proprietor of an oddly named local blog provided the angle the MSM needed to expose the Bush administration cronyism that doomed thousands of Katrina�s victims to a week of unimaginable � and unnecessary � suffering, and which may have condemned thousands of others to an untimely death.