Lesson Learned

Dear HuffPost Readers, Commenters and Bloggers :

I've read all your insightful feedback over the last few days and realized something I did not see right away but should have.

At the beginning of the week, I was so focused on making it crystal clear that we did indeed have permission to run the Clooney blog that I was blinded to another extremely important issue: that a blog, where the source of the material is not clear, diminishes the amazing work of bloggers who day in and day out put their hearts and souls into writing their blogs. I can't thank our commenters enough for, in different ways, driving this point home.

I now realize that I made a big mistake in posting a blog without clearly identifying that the material in it didn't originate as a blog post but was pieced together from previous interviews.

I'm sorry I didn't see this earlier. But I see it now and here is what I'm going to do about it:

1. Going forward, any time the HuffPost uses repurposed material we will identify it as such and source where it originally appeared and link to it. (Thank you Jeff Jarvis)

2. Even though the point of providing George Clooney a sample blog was to show how it's done and encourage him to join the blogosphere, I will curb my enthusiasm and not do this in the future.

3. When I read something or hear something in an interview or have something said to me in person that I think is really important and should have as wide an audience as possible, I will put it in my own blog, becoming Boswell to all the Dr. Johnsons out there just as I did once with Arthur Schlesinger.

We've been doing this for ten months, and the learning curve has been enormous. Consider this a major lesson learned. I get it and have taken it to heart.

Arianna