MORE ON THE NEW YORK TIMES STORY ON BLOGS AND PR: The folks at CNN send this highlight from the Reliable Sources transcript:

JEFF JARVIS, BUZZMACHINE.COM: I think “The Times” story was a sucker punch against a few bloggers who didn’t understand how to finesse this stuff. The story it really brought out is the relationship of the press to P.R..

Now, I advise bloggers in my blog that they should always reveal when a story comes from a P.R. agent, that they should reveal information that comes from P.R., and they should reveal any relationship, including lunches, that come from P.R. How many reporters do that? We don’t.

How many stories — we did an audit of a day’s TV news, locally or here on CNN, or your paper or any other paper, and see how many stories actually started with P.R., how much information came from P.R. So what “The Times” was asking the bloggers to do, the press doesn’t do. And that’s a double standard.

And in this age of transparency, I think the real lesson is that the bloggers know how to be transparent, they’ll push. A few didn’t know. OK. Now we’ll teach them how to do it better, and the press has to get better about transparency and its relationship with spin.

On “The New York Times” trying to hold bloggers to a higher standard
EDELMAN: Public relations has always been about telling the side of its client, but we only benefit when we’re telling the truth…”The New York Times” I think did in this story have a double standard.

On the “death of the gatekeepers”
JARVIS: All is fair in love and press…We’re seeing the death of the gatekeepers. The gatekeepers used to be those in power, then it was those in the press, and then — yes, now it’s P.R., who are gatekeepers to the powerful and the rich and the famous.

I did get the sense that the guy doing this story had a couple of axes to grind, involving Wal-Mart and the blogosphere. But the story itself didn’t really seem unfair; it was more the sense that he had somehow gotten hold of a big scoop when, well, he hadn’t.

UPDATE: The full Reliable Sources transcript has now been posted. Don’t miss the bits with John Hinderaker and Dave Barry, either.