Edited by author 08-08-2002 11:04 PM
I think you have the basic tension between responsible journalism and (sometimes) not-so-responsible weblog tidbits demonstrated right there. I sure don't take everything I read on a 'blog as fact - nor everything reported by journalists (though of course I would judge something like the NYT as more reliable than a tabloid like, say, Annanova or FOX news.) Sometimes the best forum for this type of story is a group blog like Metafilter. While most of the commenters there aren't journalists and don't follow all the rules of journalism, the collective investigation and insight can really shed a lot of light on a story - once you cut through all the jokes and half-truths and suspicious "authorities." It's not the same as an objective journalistic investigation - which I greatly respect, but it can at times be a wonderful and speedy alternitive source of information and fact-gathering.