SacBee wrestles with blog journalism

This column by the Sacramento Bee’s ombudsman (Are Bee’s standards for Web lower than for print?) addresses two incidents, an unedited press release published under a byline, and some controversial assertions (OK, opinions), stated by columnist Daniel Weintraub in his overnight-sensation California Insider political weblog, with its sometimes minute-by-minute coverage of the twists and turn of the California recall election.
The ombudsman thinks that Weintraub’s opinions and judgement requires an editor to vett his blog entries before letting them go live. Commenting on this, Jeff Jarvis wrote omblogsman (which is where I heard about the controversy), arguing that Weintraub should only be edited by his readers (the Dan Gillmor approach). Jarvis also thinks readers of the blog should have their email comments published in full, with Weintraub responding.
Actually, since he’s using MT, why doesn’t he just turn on comments (and trackback)? Yes, there’d be trolls, but he could IP-ban people and moderating your own comment boards is hard work but it’s refreshingly disintermediating to say the list.
I’d definitely like to be sending him trackback pings when I link to him. After I criticized an apparent slant to his posts (let’s say, toward a Republican-style concept of fiscal prudence), a few days letter he noted some similar criticism – possibly citing other journalists, I’d have to check – and somewhat defensively reprinted in boldface avery bad thing he ever said about Schwarzenegger.
I couldn’t help wondering if he has access to his referrer logs or is aware of Technorati and might, possibly, have seen my mild criticism as well. It’s nice to think so, but if he had comments and/or trackback working I could make a more direct connection with him from out here outside of the pressroom.