What's the price of a blogger's soul? In some cases, it's as little as dinner with a guest at a nice restaurant.

According to The Wall Street Journal, "As online food sites become increasingly influential in the restaurant business, chefs and owners are plying bloggers with free meals to get good write-ups. Some are also posting favorable reviews about themselves on popular Web sites or becoming Internet scribes."

This is as clear a violation of journalistic ethics as you will find. Real food critics dine anonymously and pay their own bills -- a known critic is likely to receive special treatment, which of course could make their experience less than indicative of what their readers can expect.

And then there's another problem: Is it really possible to be objective in a review when you aren't feeling the sting of having paid for it?

Blogs are certainly giving the traditional media a run for their money. But in order for the coup to be successful, they will have to adopt some of the ethical standards of the traditional media. For what it's worth, this is the policy for all blogs in the Weblogs Inc. (owned by AOL; includes BloggingStocks) network:

• Bloggers do not receive free products or services from the companies they write about.
• Bloggers do accept review units (e.g., a new cell phone at Engadget, a video game at Joystiq, or a week-long car loan at Autoblog); however, when they're finished reviewing products, they return these items to the manufacturers. If the manufacturers do not take the items back, we give them to our readers. This is the same editorial policy as the New York Times or Wall Street Journal.

I don't blame Paris Hilton and her family for trying to sell their story.

After all, why should multinational conglomerates be the only ones who get rich off her misfortune? Why shouldn't the supposedly stupid blond heiress get a piece of the action?

Brian Montopoli wonders on CBS Corp's (NYSE: CBS) PublicEye blog whether paying for an interview with Hilton would be the worst thing in the world.

"Why don't they just pay for these interviews and then disclose that they've done so to their audience? " he writes. "Wouldn't that ultimately be more journalistically honest -- and even, on this skewed scale, more ethical."

Good point.