Forced To Follow The Blogs

Clark Hoyt of the New York Times chides his paper for missing the ACORN-sting story and announces a new beat:

[Managing editor Jill Abramson] and Bill Keller, the executive editor, said last week that they would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies. Keller declined to identify the editor, saying he wanted to spare that person “a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere.”