That's what you get when you try to be clever and your body can't decide if it's lunchtime or breakfastime. Adam Cohen writes a piece on bloggers' ethics today, and I'm a bit torn about it. It's a lot hard to differentiate blog-to-blog than it is "regular" media source to "regular" media source. Take, for instance, the Dayton Daily News versus the L.A. Times. The L.A. Times is a quasi-national newspaper; not truly national, but with influence outsize to its distribution. The DDN is a local newspaper that reaches into a geographical area dominated by small suburbs and rural communities, surrounded by newspapers with larger distribution areas (Cincinnati and Columbus). No matter how good the paper is, its best work will simply be picked up and spread around the chain - but the DDN will not become a national paper. Blogs, on the other hand, are accessible universally to anyone with the technology. Boobahmafoo Blog can be gotten to with only the additional effort of typing in the extra letters just as well as Atrios or Daily Kos can. Cohen starts out with limiting his suggestions for blogger ethics to large-circulation folks, although large-circulation is a nebulous idea in and of itself - if I manage to say the right thing in a post, my site jumps to "large circulation" in mere hours, then right back down to "middling circulation" as soon as the buzz wears off.
