Another bombshell in Olympia. Veteran TNT reporter Joe Turner (best Oly blog bar none) announced he's leaving.

Part of the reason, maybe even the reason, we founded PubliCola last January was to cover Olympia in the fallout from the dwindling press corps.

At the time: Veteran Seattle Times Olympia reporters David Postman and Ralph Thomas had announced they were out the door; the PI, about to close its print edition, lost its Oly reporter, Chris McGann; and veteran AP Olympia reporter Dave Ammons also left. (He's clearly missing it.)

We dove in, scooped some stories—that the legislature was poised to repeal I-937 (the renewable energy initiative), named the Seattle legislators who voted to saddle Seattle with any tunnel cost overruns—and were the first online publication in state history to get press credentials to cover the state legislature.

In the months after the session, more veteran reporters left: The Spokesman Review's Rich Roesler (my favorite of the crew) and The Olympian's Adam Wilson.

Turner takes a swipe at blogs in his farewell announcement:

Blogs won't replace newspapers. They are like newspapers before the Civil War, where each of them espoused a particular viewpoint and finding neutral reporting was difficult if not impossible.

I do hope Joe is including the Independent Journal in that assessment, the New York paper that ran 80 some screeds by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay (totally the first bloggers) that became known as the Federalist Papers and helped sway the states in the confederation to adopt the Constitution.

Their anonymous handle? Publius—a reference to Roman Republican, Publius Valerius Publicola! (Even though PubliCola strives for less partisanship than most blogs, that's where our name comes from.)

In all seriousness, I didn't know Joe well. I only got acquainted with him last session. He was always helpful, but was clearly a competitor—teasing and cajoling you when he knew he had a scoop coming.

And he had plenty.