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I see that the always smart Justene Adamec at the pro-recall conservative CalBlog joins me in saying let's wait to see IF Dan Weintraub's freedom to blog away has in fact been curtailed. At this point, a lot of the outrage on the Internet strikes me as insulting to Weintraub. It assumes that his views are being muzzled, yet that would mean he let it quietly happen and hasn't fought back online or in his many unedited media appearances. Justene asks if the worriers have actually read Weintraub's print columns -- all of them edited, yet hardly muzzled in substance.
She also notes that Weintraub told the Online Journalism Review awhile ago that editor oversight was always a possibility:
For Weintraub, it will be a judgment call he'll make alone. Right now, he can post items on the Weblog without an editor's oversight -- though Mark Paul, his print editor, sees each item right after it's posted. That kind of freedom is rare in a big news organization, though it could change. Right now, the Bee's blogging foray is in its infancy, and editors consider it an experiment before setting rules in stone.
Just to reiterate: As I posted below, I think the Bee has a made a mistake by requiring that blog items be read first by an editor. The paper should trust Weintraub to post instantaneously, just as he speaks for the Bee unedited on TV and radio frequently. Blog posts fall somewhere between off-the-cuff remarks a talking head makes on TV and an opinion column for the print paper. But I'm not fretting that Weintraub has been censored until I know that he actually has been, and that he is concerned about it. As I argue in my longer post, newspaper "editing" of opinion writers does not necessarily imply changing the substance of a piece.
If the editor pre-read does have a chilling effect on Weintraub, however, that's almost as bad as outright muzzling. If that's going on, the Bee has blown its moment in the blogging spotlight. I, for one, am hoping somebody reports on all this from inside the Bee.
Update: J.D. Lasica of OJR, who worked at the Bee and has written on this very topic, has some good thoughts on how editing can affect a blog.