There’s nothing about blogging that a reporter with a functioning ethical compass needs to fear, and by now the straw-man arguments to the contrary really frost me.

As Tim notes, you’d be insane to hang a front-page expose on some anonymous blog comment. But I didn’t hear Gina suggest that. She said that blog comments can be terrific for getting a sense of how feelings are running in a given community, and she’s absolutely right, particularly since by now some of those blog communities are as vibrant and fully formed as real-world ones.

Similarly, there’s a big difference between using a blog to put together a story bit by bit, with the first bits too incomplete for print, and blogging any old thing because you can get rid of it later. And she knows that, too. Heck, if we were inventing a tool for telling readers about corrections and our choices were strikethrough and the print paper’s corrections box, it’s pretty obvious which one we’d pick.

Concur on Gina — I visit her every day and always find something to lift my game. I hope Matt’s colleagues will do the same.

I agree. I’ve said before that Gina’s blog should be required reading for every newsroom staffer. This particular entry is just more common sense from the seemingly bottomless font.

On the names, I think that the print side of the house does get a bit hung up on real names, but there’s also a tradeoff; whether to hang your story on the quotes of ToiletBoy or Bobby76739 depends a lot on the subject matter or seriousness. I’d think long and hard, for example, before attributing any charges or claims of impropriety on a screenname only.