Mr. Burns also cited the journalistic rule against paying for stories, adding that his talking heads were free to contribute apocrypha about a historical subject, since they were not on his payroll.

What is alleged to have happened, it goes without saying, breaches every journalistic rule in the book ...

Outing has become relatively mainstream, and the journalistic rules regarding the disclosure of the sexual orientation of public figures is now largely in keeping with OutWeek's original goals.

As a newspaperman, I have been watching and reading, astonished, as journalistic rules about not assuming or implying guilt before a trial went into the garbage can.

"I thought I was acting within journalistic rules, frankly," Mr. Heidenry said.

As the old journalistic rules don't apply in the "New News," so the old journalistic yardsticks for critiquing it are outdated.

"It's personal etiquette meets journalistic rules," Mr. Denton, the blog publisher, said.

As Remnick explains in the introduction, the journalistic rules were different back then, and writers routinely added color to their stories in the form of made-up details and faked quotations.

Like memoirists, perhaps they're allowed to bend the journalistic rules - encourage the sun to set more pinkly or conjure up the requisite village savant.

And he was so outraged by this that he decided to break all the journalistic rules, and he came to me to tell me.