The NYT reports on how the Huffington Post came to make a post with George Clooney's words, and apparently approved by George Clooney's people, but not actually written by Clooney -- much to the annoyance of Clooney himself.

Some excerpts:

"These are not my writings — they are answers to questions and there is a huge difference," Mr. Clooney said.

But that difference seemed to be lost, at least at first, on Ms. Huffington, who repeatedly pointed to the clear breakdown in Mr. Clooney's public relations machinery, and then later suggested, in a post on her blog, that in any case, "the medium isn't the message; the message is the message." ...

At The Huffington Post, the colors, logos, headshots, bios, rubrics and timestamps visually unify all of the blog postings and say "we are of a kind." And it is to Ms. Huffington's credit that the quirks of each individual's posting at the site — Mr. Clooney's name and picture, as well as his syntax, his supposed choice of paragraph breaks and punctuation and his gathering rhetorical pitch — have the same implications as those of any reputable publication.

They say, "Hello, I'm the person responsible for putting these ideas together in this way. I then posted them to this blog. Or I e-mailed them to Arianna. Or I scribbled them onto a cocktail napkin and sent them to her by carrier pigeon. But at some point I crafted this train of thought in this way, and now I'm sharing it with you here."

It's not printed anywhere, of course, but the medium — the blog — carries that message.

It was a point that an increasing number of Ms. Huffington's readers and fellow bloggers — from Elizabeth Snead at The Los Angeles Times to Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine — were looking for her to acknowledge by week's end.

"Say you're sorry, Arianna," Ms. Snead wrote at The Envelope blog (theenvelope.latimes.com). Jeff Jarvis, who blogs at BuzzMachine.com and has served as a consultant to The New York Times on Web matters, condemned the puppetry of assembling a blog post for Mr. Clooney.

"If you're not really writing your blog, if you're having or allowing someone else to do it for you," Mr. Jarvis wrote on Friday morning, "then you're gaming me, lying to me, insulting me."

And dozens of Huffington Post readers agitated for an apology. "I think that the whole George Clooney thing was appalling on your part," one commenter wrote. "Regardless of the communication that you had with George's people, you misled your readers."

On Saturday morning, admirably, Ms. Huffington came to agree, admitting in a post titled "Lessons Learned" to a "big mistake" for failing to source the quotes and for writing the post for Mr. Clooney in the first place.

This will not happen again, she wrote, because "it diminishes the amazing work of bloggers who day in and day out put their hearts and souls into writing their blogs."

However, she went on to say this:

Ms. Huffington also suggested that, going forward, when she comes across a published interview, or when someone prominent says something to her that she thinks is "really important and should have as wide an audience as possible," she will quote it in her own section of the blog — much as James Boswell documented the comings and goings of Samuel Johnson, she said.

Indeed, she intends to name the form for Boswell: "BozBlogging."

Or, you could just call it journalism.

Here's an archived version of the March 12 Clooney "post."

Here's Huffington's Lessons Learned post.