How the financial blogosphere gave birth to Felix Salmon.

The gravitational change in the media that has left some formerly influential journalists floating weightless in the ether while others have been crushed under the load of new expectations  has also opened up opportunity. The Web’s Big Bang, especially during a financial crisis, has created new, influential voices that might have been starved for oxygen in an earlier media galaxy.

One of these new voices—Reuters’ free-form finance blogger Felix Salmon—appeared virtually out of nowhere when Portfolio.com launched early in 2007. He is perhaps the most dramatic example of someone whose reputation has been made entirely by the almost overwhelming and nearly unbelievable transformation of both the media and the economy in recent years.

But Salmon is quick to claim he has little or no influence, not much traffic, and barely rates in terms of importance. His pet example: Ben Stein. Beginning in May 2007, shortly after he started writing for Portfolio.com, Salmon began making cracks about Stein’s Sunday New York Times column. The posts evolved by the end of that summer into a running gag called the Ben Stein Watch.

It was all harmless fun, if you consider this harmless: "Stein lives in a world," Salmon wrote in March 2009, "where flying commercial is always a chore; where few hotels are as well-appointed as his own homes; where every day he spends in a vaguely public place is a day he risks being accosted and held to account for the uncountable gallons of extremely harmful drivel that he has inflicted on his readers and viewers for years."

By his own estimate, Salmon has devoted about 35,000 words to kicking Stein. But it wasn’t until mid-July of this year that Salmon considered Stein beyond the pale. The sonorous economist had begun appearing in ads for Freescore.com, a credit-report company. "It's simply unconscionable for a newspaper of record to employ ...  someone," Salmon wrote, "who is surely making a vast amount of money by luring the unsuspecting into overpaying for a financial product they should under no circumstances buy."

At first, his attack seemed to get little traction, thus proving Salmon’s claims of insignificance. "If I had any influence in the world," Salmon said to me over a late-July lunch in Midtown Manhattan, "do you think Ben Stein would still have a column in the New York Times? Seriously."