Say what you will about bloggers...

I'm sure most of you have been following (or at least heard about) U.S. Rep. Mark Foley's resignation in light of "inappropriate" e-mails with at least one young page.

If you're like me, you've been a bit confused.

It's been easy to read his e-mails to a former Louisiana legislative page, but they're not exactly salacious. They're creepy, and I would be upset if I had a kid receiving messages asking for pictures and personal info, but news reports keep saying he resigned because of "sexually explicit" messages.

So the deal is, those Louisiana-kid messages aren't the e-mails that led him to resign. But when they were brought to light, they did lead someone to bring forward other — apparently quite graphic — e-mails and instant messages from Foley to pages.

You might also have heard about the St. Petersburg Times getting ahold of these e-mails LAST YEAR and interviewing the kid. But they never ran the story. So what happened?

Today, Poynter links to a note from the St. Pete editors about why they were, you know, a year late to the party.

The answer, of course, is a classic tale of traditional journalism versus the publish-anything-you-want world of blogging. From the editors' note:

The Louisiana boy's emails broke into the open last weekend, when a blogger got copies and posted them online. Later that week, on Thursday, a news blog at the website of ABC News followed suit, with the addition of one new fact: Foley's Democratic opponent, Tim Mahoney, was on the record about the Louisiana boy's emails and was calling for an investigation. That's when we wrote our first story, for Friday's papers.

After ABC News broke the story on its website, someone contacted ABC and provided a detailed email exchange between Foley and at least one other page that was far different from what we had seen before. This was overtly sexual, not something Foley could dismiss as misinterpreted friendliness. That's what drove Foley to resign on Friday.

So what to think? I'll be honest, this is a complex journalistic decision that could (and should) be debated at journalism schools around the world.

In this case, tossing traditional reporting guidelines to the wind led to the removal of a pedophile from Congress. Oh, I'm sorry...the removal of an alcoholic from Congress.

But does that mean that newspapers should relax their guidelines on anonymous sources and potentially devastating allegations? Hard to say.

My opinion: The documents the St. Pete Times had in hand were enough to publish something. If the validity of the messages was proven, then it's at least worth putting in a column or editorial that maybe congressmen shouldn't be asking young boys for their pictures and talking about what "great shape" other boys are in.

The newspaper industry has lost the ability to simply sit on hot documents and hope a story emerges someday. They need to become part of the forum of public debate, or else newspaper reporters will find they're not being handed much of anything worth reporting.

EDIT: Oooh, look, you can read the super-creepy instant messages! (Don't worry, ABC only includes the disturbing-yet-not-graphic portions of what was obviously the IM equivalent of a night in the hot tub with Roman Polanski.