TIM RUTTEN SAYS THE INTERNET BROUGHT DOWN HOWELL RAINES:

More significant, the Times scandal — which began a little more than a month ago when it was revealed that 27-year-old reporter Jayson Blair had fabricated and plagiarized news stories — was the first institutional crisis of its kind to unwind in real time. Just as live combat reports from the Iraq war transfixed a global audience, so too did reports on events inside the New York Times transmitted via Internet media news sites, online magazines and newspaper editions, blogs and e-mails.

Every significant turn in the entire sequence and every memo issued by Sulzberger, Raines and Boyd was immediately posted on the Internet. When Rick Bragg, the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning feature writer and a Raines favorite, was suspended for turning in a story based on an unsalaried freelance writer’s uncredited work, he defended his conduct as standard among the Times’ national correspondents. For 24 hours or so, that defense caromed around the Internet, uncontradicted by Raines or Boyd. . . .

And, in the end, it was the new world of Web sites, blogs, online editions and e-mails — not Raines — that set the pace of his exit.

Indeed.

UPDATE: Rand Simberg notes that Rutten wasn’t always so impressed with blogs. Well, live and learn.