The Atlantic Monthly published its own Wikipedia piece recently (online version here).   If you take the New Yorker profile and mash it together with the Atlantic piece, there's a certain amount of overlap on the plate -- most of the flavor will come from the New Yorker, but the Atlantic has more of the gory Sanger details.  Both are worth reading.

It does seem this month as if the mainstream writing about collective online activity is itself getting more measured and reasonable.  I agreed with just about everything Nicholas Lemann said in this week's NYker about blogging and journalism (even if it's all old news), although I wish he hadn't been quite so unnecessarily snarky and categorical at times.  Not all bloggers think they're journalists, and no one is gainsaying the skills of journalists who have the resources to do deep reporting.

When I was in law school, the institution had a one-year fellowship for a journalist -- he/she took some first year courses and generally became part of the place.  It was a great idea, and I think it served its purpose of revealing some of the mystery of legal thought to the journalists who went through the program. (Guilds are intentionally mysteries -- the point is to keep other people from being able to practice the skills that the trade requires.)

What's the online equivalent?  If journalists need to (do they?) soak up online life for a while so that they can practice its mysteries and not come off sounding hopeless, what's the program?  (In Lemann's words, "traditional journalists answering [the] challenges [of Internet cheerleaders] often sound either clueless or cowed and apologetic.")  Jeff Jarvis has some suggestions. 

But a better approach might be letting reporters have a personality online -- not just the occasional video, but a constant online presence that's more than a byline.  That's the place to learn, rather than in the traditional confines of a business school or a journalism school. 

In the meantime, I'm feeling sanguine about the future of "serious" writing about what's going on online.  Things are looking up. 

(I think learned to use "serious" in this way by going to musicology conferences.  The contemporary music that musicologists talk about is "serious."  The stuff that people actually listen to on the radio is . . . not serious.  There's a similar treatment going on in the blogger-journalist dynamic -- the journalists are "serious" and the bloggers aren't.  But it's all writing, just as the stuff being listened to is all music.  And the "serious" people sometimes have very small audiences.)