A few hours from now, Eliot Spitzer will surrender the office of New York governor to David Paterson. A few hours from now, it will be exactly a week since the New York Times posted the first report on its website about Spitzer being “linked” to a prostitution ring.
So what did that initial explosion look like, online? All it takes is a little bit of trial-and-error on Memeorandum, the live-updated aggregation of the political blogosphere, find out where the Spitzer scandal first popped into online consciousness. Specifically, it appeared about midway down the page of the 2:20 p.m. update like so:
Just kinda sandwiched in there between a couple other articles getting some contemporaneous linkage from around the ’sphere. Hats off to Jammie Wearing Fool and New York Magazine — one pure blogger, one blogging MSM outlet — for getting there first, even if some luck played a part in their picking up the Times report ahead of the pack. And it didn’t take an hour for the rest of the pack to join in. The article reached its highest point of linkage at 5:15 in the evening, just shy of three hours after it was first posted:
The rest is recent history: the offline mediasphere swooped in after, Gov. Spitzer threw in the towel after 48 hours’ thought, and his consort, Ashley Alexandra Dupre/DiPietro/Youmans joined Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails among the few musical artists to earn millions releasing music online. Aside from a “60 Minutes” interview a few years down the road (his) or a reality show on E! (hers) this story is about done. Coincidentally, just in time for the McGreevey sex scandal to make headlines and bloglines once again.
Bonus pre-scandal tidbit: Lest we fgorget, here’s Hotline’s Quote of the Day from Feb. 27:
“I’ll be there maybe later in the week or next week, if this continues.” NY Gov. Eliot Spitzer, explaining why he won’t be campaigning for HRC in OH 2/27
In retrospect, I’m sure he would have rather spent that week campaigning for Sen. Clinton.
