Deborah Howell, the WaPo’s ombudsman tries, in the context of William Arkin’s recent rant, to explain the difference between the print paper and WaPo.com’s blogs. Arkin himself is presented largely as a blogger, though, as Hugh Hewitt has pointed out in a different context, his resume is more complicated than that and has a fairly substantial "journalistic" element.

What is clear is that WaPo.com is more lightly edited (and hence perhaps more revealing of the "feelings" of the writers) than is the print paper. Presumably, however, there is someone responsible for the thrust of the entire enterprise, so that we should in fact think that WaPo.com does reflect (badly or well) on the WaPo, whether Deborah Howell wants us to or not.