Birmingham News staff writer Brett Blackledge, who won a Pulitzer Prize for investigating mostly Black Democrats who work in Alabama’s two-year college system and also happen to be into public service by serving in the state legislature, is taking my advice and leaving the paper to take a job in Washington, D.C. with the Associated Press.

While I broke the story on an e-mail list on Friday that his days were numbered, here is the first mention of the departure in the paper, in Executive Editor Tom Scarrett’s little column that normally deserves scant notice since it usually says nothing about nothing.

We face a special challenge at The Birmingham News because we are losing a special reporter. Brett Blackledge, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, is leaving our staff to become an enterprise reporter in The Associated Press’ Washington bureau, doing investigative work on national security and intelligence issues. It’s a great opportunity for him, but a great loss for us in Alabama.

Watchdog Reporting Biggest Job?

And like I’ve said on the blog and the radio before, the Birmingham News‘s idea of watchdog journalism is sort of the like the Bush Justice Department’s idea of justice: All the time and money goes into investigating mostly poor Black Democrats, while the big time corruption of rich White Republicans is completely ignored.

When Blackledge did his first hit job on Jill Simpson, I told him he should use the clout of that Pulitzer to get the heck out of here and go to work for a real news organization somewhere else.

Good luck Brett. And good riddance. Alabama’s political system has been screwed up bad enough by bad reporting from the “Bug Mule” papers before. Now perhaps we can begin the real job of media reform in this state.

For those of you interested in following the news on media reform, there are a number of stories today on the Poynter Institute’s site that talk about the problems of the traditional newspaper industry, including an analysis from the New York Times saying this year could be the worst ever for newspapers, and another from Ad Age saying “the sky is falling! It’s totally falling, for real!”