Arrington's Techcrunch Moves Even Startle Trade Mag Editors theatlantic.com
Excerpt
Here's what's interesting about this situation to me: the set of solutions to common information problems that we call journalism is coming unglued as different types of publications become possible on the Internet.
The generally accepted sense of journalistic ethics says you shouldn't have financial conflicts of interest and that this is not negotiable at the individual level. Journalism ethics reside in publications and more broadly within the idea of the fourth estate.
But the specific ethical principles of journalism were only true for certain types of publications, largely newspapers and magazines aka the MSM. Now, we've got a whole bunch of new types of publications with readerships rivaling the MSM but that are something different altogether.