Journalistic Integrity and Blogs: Is it important when you’re blogging?
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Over the weekend, I was thinking about this, and reading the entry on journalistic integrity at Wikipedia. Do bloggers consider it ok to make up stuff for their blog posts? With millions of blogs, how can any of us have any sense of who to trust? Does popularity, the most common measure of blogs, automatically mean integrity? Take Technorati’s list of popular blogs, as an example, should we trust every blog on that list, because they’re popular? Is it even possible for a blogger who violates the rules of journalistic integrity to make a top list like that? Are the rules for integrity different for bloggers than they are for traditional journalists?
Peter Davis is a web developer, investor, author, entrepreneur, and most importantly a father. 
It is personally important to me.
I would say the rules are the same (rules for integrity don’t really change, I don’t think). It may be possible to make that list without integrity, but, if you lack integrity… if you make stuff up, and you’re that popular, people are going to know because other people (and a lot of them) will blog about it. So, I think the more popular you are, the harder it is for you to make stuff up and/or be incorrect.
Thanks for the reply. Part of me thinks that bloggers will need to have even higher standards, to prove themselves, being the ‘new kids on the block’ so to speak. But then, I remember issues here at the Boston Globe (http://www.transparencynow.com/globe.htm) that clearly show that traditional journalists haven’t always held to their own standards, and it shouldn’t be difficult for bloggers to exceed that.