Edit This!
Tim Rutten's Los Angeles Times media column looks at the controversy raging over Sacramento Bee columnist Daniel Weintraub's widely admired political news blog and the paper's decision to submit Weintraub's blog to the oversight of editors instead of allowing it to go directly from his PC to the web - a decision made because Weintraub wrote something rather innocuous that nevertheless offended some Latino politicos.

Orville Schell, dean of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, is quoted in Rutten's column:

"An edited blog is a contradiction in terms. It's a characteristic of the Internet in general that forms like the blog emerge with great exuberance and edgy promise and then the overseers move in. That's a pity. We need frontiers of plain-speaking, even it's politically incorrect. I understand why the Bee did what it did, but it leads to a restraint on free-thinking, which is lamentable."

Actually, Schell is wrong. An edited blog is not a contradiction in terms. Blogs are edited all the time - but by their readers rather than by a paid editor, via reader comments, emails to the blogger and items posted on other blogs. You can, for example, see what others are saying about my posts, good and bad (and unedited by me!) by checking out my Technorati-provided Link Cosmos. If someone takes issue on their blog with what I've written here, it'll show up on the Link Cosmos. And usually a blog's "editors" include a number of readers with actual expertise in the given subject matter, and the ability to provide links to source materials to back up their suggested additions and changes. And the results are generally of much higher quality, with more depth and expertise, than anything you find in a typical newspaper where reporters and editors who have no expertise in the given subject matter try to act as if they do.

And here's the best part about the way blogs are edited: Other readers get to watch the editing process unfold, live, online, and decide for themselves if the results are credible. Newspapers, on the other hand, just say "trust us" in the face of rising evidence that readers should do no such thing.

Watch for the reader comments below, check here for updates, and follow my blog's Link Cosmos to see how this post gets edited by its readers.