Here's how it used to work. Justin would hear about the stabbing, call the police, get information, including a report, and seek out witnesses and the victim for interviews. He would fill his notebook, probably with the same types of comments posted on the blog, but at the end of the day would sit down and write a story for the next day's print edition.

It might be a straightforward account of the stabbing. It might be a piece on the neighborhood and the underlying tension between the old and new residents. Or it might be a story about pub crawls. It even could be a broader piece on all of this. Reporters are used to fighting their way through a myraid of conflicting stories, with everyone, including police, advancing their own agendas, and then boiling it down to what we think is essential and true.

But in this day and age, this process played out live on the Internet. Just as residents used the constant postings to keep abreast of developments, Justin was able to quickly locate participants, including the victim, who didn't have to be found, but rather called in to give his version of what happened.

But I'm left wondering if the attraction was the story that resulted from a days worth of intense reporting or the messy process. The blog postings and the commentary is akin to the dumping of a reporters notebook, and that took off on the Internet like I've never seen before. The final story, however, did rather poorly.

In some ways, it was participatory journalism and it allowed observers, residents and drinkers to help shape the story in real-time. But it was a bar-room brawl that, while fun, resulted in more hurtful commentary and rhetoric than cold-hard facts. It's a little disconcerting that the final, more truthful, more nuanced story didn't fare as well as the on-line reporting.