Should Bloggers be Journalists?

Washington Post on blogging;

"The Internet today is like the American West in the 1880s. It's wild, it's crazy and everybody's got a gun," said Thomas Kunkel, dean of the University of Maryland's journalism school. "There are no rules yet."

The common journalistic practices of verifying facts, seeking both sides of a story and subjecting an article to editing are honored mostly in the breach. Innuendo and rumor ricochet around the Internet as blogs link from one to another, at times making defamatory voices indistinguishable from the many others involved in this experiment of free expression"