I'm not so sure! To me, the most memorable (and heroic) scene in All the President's Men is where Woodstein pore over thousands of White House book request slips. If "heroic Watergate journalism" has come to mean something else, that's a function of the misunderstood mythology around those guys, not the acts themselves.

It's important to note, too, that journalism is also invested in the production of documents — one of the competitive advantages that blogs have is that their archives are freely searchable, and they can cherry-pick the best of what they find from their own (or others') past reporting. There's every bit the same urge to get to a story first and crack it open, but no sense at places like TPM, so far as I can tell, of being bummed out or hesitant to report on something to the gills because someone else got there first. No need to reinvent the wheel when you can link to it instead.

I had to laugh when I heard some congressman telling Joe Scarborough that "no one in the House read the stimulus bill" before they voted yes. Then Joe et al were "shocked, shocked!"

Then I asked myself.."Shouldn't that be a journalists job?"

"Find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record." is very specifically not heroic Watergate journalism.

The news bit applies to what Wikinews aspires to.