But it wasn't long after for there to be lots more mainstream media coverage ...

Mt. Gox hack ("BTC/USD traded down to one penny"), Silk Road, etc.

Possibly, there could have been an article or two prior ... maybe something like when Wikileaks was accepting bitcoin. But at a minimum, this article did, I believe, have the greatest reach relative to the size of the bitcoin community at the time.

This helped to propel researcher Jerry Brito's career, and he has been in the bitcoin space since (e.g., founder of Coin Center)