I started this as a comment in the main page, but it got a bit long, so here goes:
Blogs are an entirely different medium. While I agree with Roth that:
That's all fine. But you also relish your "outlaw" status to "gleefully flaunt" the rules traditional media try to follow. Sooner or later, you're going to have to choose between the rewards of being taken seriously, and the rewards of behaving like a two-year-old who has just discovered he can break things. You don't get both.
, he's a bit mistaken about applying journalistic ethics to blogs.
Blogs do need ethics, but they're not the same ethics as journalists. Kos is right that his readers would go elsewhere if they were truly offended by his posting of the exit polls, but we didn't so we obviously weren't offended. That rule applies to journalists because their cardinal rule is to observe and report but not to affect the outcome.
There is no such rule in the blogosphere. In fact, part of the reason that people write blogs is so that they will have an effect on the outside world, so why shouldn't Kos be able to post whatever he likes on the subject.
On that note, bloggers have ethics that journalists do not. For example, it is not cool to expose people's anonymity. Kos probably knows who Atrios is, but it would be a serious breach of blogger ethics for him to expose Atrios. A journalist has no right to anonymity and exposing the author of "Primary Colors" was great sport among journalists for a while.
I think that Kos is taken seriously by both us and the mainstream because he understands this and frankly is a pioneer in coming up with what a trusted blogger looks like