Editorial integrity? Slashdot?

I like Andrew Leonard's reportage about free software; he's generally the most clueful person covering it. But his recent story detailing concerns about Slashdot maintaining its editorial integrity with the acquisition of its parent company, Andover.net, by VA Linux misses the mark wildly.

Don't you have to have editorial integrity for concerns about maintaining it to make sense? And don't you have to have editors before the issue of their integrity makes sense? Are people now going to seriously maintain that what the Slashdot guys do is journalism? I know it's a terribly debased profession, what with the corporatization of it proceeding at lightspeed, but come on! Part of whatever charm Slashdot has ever had was precisely in the fact that its content was, journalistically speaking, total amateur hour.

Sure, sure, the Web site as a piece of technology is decent; but no one ever pretended that these guys were doing journalism. And that's fine, it didn't need to be a journalistic outlet to have value to the free software community. Slashdot has always been an electronic, Web version of those kiosks you see on college campuses, where people put up placards and posters of upcoming events. But no one ever mistook those kiosks, which serve an important community function, for the campus newspaper.

I like Slashdot well enough; it remains an important site in the increasingly corporatized, commercial free software world, no doubt. But concerns about its "journalistic integrity" are simply misplaced. After all, does anyone seriously wonder about Matt Drudge's journalistic integrity? No, because no one takes him seriously as a journalist; or, if they do, they do so at their peril.

Taking Slashdot as a source of journalism about the free software world is equally perilous. There is nothing VA Linux, or Andover.net before them, could possibly do to make it more so.