One quiet decision, and a blog feels the pain of being the dreaded mainstream media.

It's easy to change the past. All you need is a time machine, a map to Hitler's Austrian flat, and... oh wait, no. I meant online. Yeah, that's even easier.

Whether you run a blog, an anime fan forum or The New York Times, it's simple to alter your digital archives. The question, of course, is: Should you?

Today, the tremendously popular blog Boing Boing responded to a simmering controversy about whether it had "disappeared" sex-themed writer Violet Blue from its archives. Without giving details on what she did wrong as a contributor, Boing Boing posted this:

"Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her. It's our blog and so we made an editorial decision, like we do every single day. We didn't attempt to silence Violet. We unpublished our own work. There's a big difference between that and censorship."

After a flurry of comments, positive and negative, the moderator posted a follow-up that included this interesting disclaimer:

"This is not Wikipedia or the New York Times. Boing Boing began as a personal blog, and still is in some ways, even though Boing Boing is a bigger thing now. When new information becomes clear, or someone's behavior changes, sometimes a creator of work reconsiders what aspects of their personal creative work they're proud of, and removes them from public view."

It's times like this that bloggers should realize we're far more similar to mainstream journalists than we'd usually like to think. Here's why:

As at least one commenter pointed out, bloggers would likely feast on the flesh of any mainstream news site that extracted all of a writer's work from its archives without an explanation.

Also, Boing Boing seems to imply that newspapers are universally steadfast in keeping their archives complete no matter what. Admittedly, that's been true with The New York Times, which still lets you go back and read articles written by disgraced writer Jayson Blair.   

But that's not to say that every newspaper agrees.

The Fort Wayne (Ind.) News-Sentinel recently found itself at the center of a plagiarism scandal that led to the resignation of White House aide Timothy Goeglein, who had written several opinion columns for the News-Sentinel over the years.

Out of curiosity, I check today, and all of Goeglein's contributions to the News-Sentinel have since been removed — or, as Boing Boing would say, "unpublished."

"We've removed Tim's columns from the archives that the public has access to; otherwise, we'd have stuff out there with our name on it that is not what it claims to be," News-Sentinel Opinion Editor Leo Morris wrote me via e-mail.

"But we've left them on our internal archives. And we removed ALL of his columns. We didn't find evidence on some that they were plagiarized, but because so many were, we decided we couldn't take the chance."

I also e-mailed Dr. Roy Peter Clark, Senior Scholar at the Poynter Institute and one of the leading voices in the field of journalism. He agrees that there's no one course of action for dealing with a fallen writer.

After investigating its own Pulitzer-winning columnist, Diana Griego Erwin, The Sacramento Bee exposed her as a plagiarist in 2005. The paper chose to keep her besmirched stories in the online archive. But Dr. Clark, who had long been an admirer of Griego Erwin's work, said he probably wouldn't have made the same call:

"If I had been the editor," Clark said, "I would not have felt right leaving stories on the site that were as questionable as these were."

To be clear, I'm not criticizing Boing Boing's decision, and I'm definitely not comparing Violet Blue to a plagiarist.

But as a former newspaper journalist turned blogger, I do like to take opportunities to point out that it's not always "us versus them." It isn't easy being held to high standards, especially if you try to deny those standards even exist.