Here’s a word from a journalist to those in politics whose world has gone totally nuts: welcome to bonkersville. We don’t have a constitution that lays out our rules (though we do have the Constitution assuring that we can do what we do). But for quite a few years now the bedrock ethical principles of our profession have been challenged by new models that have altered both the process and content of journalism. Some of this has been a wonderful tonic. And some has been toxic. We’ve been trying to sort out things for a while.

Which brings us to the controversial publication of a strangely produced “dossier” involving our president-elect and the Russians. Buzzfeed published it this past week, 35 pages long. It had red-hot but unverified allegations, and it apparently was the subject of intelligence briefings given to Donald Trump and the current president. Those briefings were the subject matter of a CNN story this week. CNN did not print the dossier, which included a mind-boggling sexual escapade. And other publications had the opportunity to print the dossier but did not. Buzzfeed did, later explaining that its move was appropriate in today’s climate.

In its short history, Buzzfeed has done some absolutely terrific journalism — great investigative reporting, sharp political work, and some superb tech writing, under the guidance of my former Wired colleague Mat Honan. But it also has broken questionable new ground in muddying the distinction between news and distraction. It was kind of cool that Buzzfeed got about nine hundred billion hits or so from messing with our minds with The Dress, that picture of wedding garb that may have been blue or may have been white? But when I read Buzzfeed’s editor-in-chief Ben Smith triumphal, congratulatory note to his staff where he spoke of a story involving the ambiguity of a dress color as if it were a scoop with the impact of Watergate and the cultural import of the Enlightenment, I couldn’t get out of bed for a week.

Still, I am not paralyzed with cognitive dissonance by the fact that Buzzfeed has a light side and serious side. This week’s controversy dealt squarely with its serious side. Standard journalistic ethics dictate that such a dossier, including scabrous accusations of questionable veracity, should be held, or at the least described warily. But Smith justified the move in a note to his staff, a sort of mini-manifesto as to why this was OK in the internet age. The note, which he publicly circulated in a tweet (ah, 2017!), is a gutsy step in redefining the right thing to do in journalism today.

I actually have more of a problem with this explanation than I do with the actual publication of the dossier, for which there are reasonable arguments for and against. The line about always erring on the side of publication is a particularly hard one to swallow. It actually makes me a little wobbly because I generally dread situations where something I publish gets all tied up with the word “err.” So much so that I, like most “traditional” journalists, actually take the opposite tack, choosing to forgo the positive consequences of publishing edgy but unverified stuff so we can lay our heads on the pillow knowing that our errors of omission hurt ourselves more than errors of publishing can harm subjects of inaccurate, damaging information.

In the context of an anything-goes internet, I can understand why he says it. The sentiment really was best expressed by Nick Denton of Gawker, who was the king of the err-on-the-side-of-publishing ethos, at least until it bankrupted him. Smith and Denton both seem to chafe at the idea that insiders are privy to information when the general public is not. Readers should be free, Smith believes, “to make up their own mind” on the subject.

In this case, I’m not sure what we’re making up our minds about. Readers did not have a certain scene in a Moscow hotel room in their minds before Buzzfeed published a paragraph that was guaranteed to go viral in a way that would rival The Dress. Now those images — even though they come with the caveat that they may be total fabrications — are dancing in our heads and have launched ten thousand lousy jokes on Twitter. Personally, I think what CNN did in this case — reporting the news that the dossier was the subject of intelligence briefings but withholding the salacious, quite possibly fictional, details — was just right.

That’s not to say that Buzzfeed should be sanctioned for publishing the dossier. Every publication should be free to publish whatever it thinks appropriate, as long as it’s legal. (Remember that Constitution I mentioned? And by the way — no publication should be banned from a press conference or denied credentials because a public official is unhappy with its editorial choices. Just sayin’.) Even in the age of “fake news,” I believe that readers will ultimately determine the credibility of the publications that they consume. Story by story, day by day, publications construct their reputation, and big choices like that have an oversize impact. Buzzfeed now owns its choice, and its leaders seem to be happy with it, so more power to them.

Backchannel hasn’t been faced with this kind of situation, so I’m not going to second-guess Buzzfeed. But I do think it’s important to convey to our readers that our content is determined by the worth of our stories rather than their potential to release dopamine. The stories that give us satisfaction are those that appear nowhere else on the Internet and feature deep reporting or original thought. These are high standards and sometimes we may not hit the mark, but that’s what we go for every day.

We will try to err on the side of accuracy. More than ever, we believe that must be a reporter’s job in 2017. If we fall short, please let us know.

This week provided some examples of how Backchannel works.

The Inside Story of BitTorrent’s Bizarre Collapse. Jessi Hempel originally was going to write a short piece for our Follow Up Friday series about this company — for the first Friday in December. But as she kept uncovering details about what happened when the creators of a great technology tried to build a company around it, the story got more ambitious.

Phil Schiller on iPhone’s Launch, How It Changed Apple, and Why It Will Keep Going for 50 Years We knew that lots of places would be writing about the iPhone’s 10th anniversary, but since I was there, and actually spoke to Steve Jobs at the event, we figured that the piece would clear our bar for uniqueness. When we landed an interview with Apple senior vp Phil Schiller — the only on-the-record session that Apple conducted for this milestone — we knew our story would stand out from the pack, which is exactly where we want to be.

How Netflix Lost Big to Amazon in India. I bet you never heard about the battle between Netflix and Amazon in India. We hadn’t either, so we were immediately interested in this story. Hey, more people are on India’s internet in that country than in the United States, so here is a significant subject and a well-rendered tale that reflects on a global streaming-video competition between those familiar giants.

And from last week…

Oscar is Disrupting Health Care in a Hurricane. Oscar is a health insurance startup that wants to pull an Uber on the industry. Behind a family drama — one brother is co-founder of a company whose customers all come from Obamacare, the other brother is the top advisor of the president-elect who wants to repeal the law — is an even more dramatic question of whether it is possible to disrupt in such a heavily regulated field, especially in this pivotal moment for health insurance. In this fragile moment for the company, Oscar trusted us to do the deepest dive yet on its effort.

One other note: Last week, Medium CEO Evan Williams announced layoffs and a vow to develop a new business model for content on its platform. Though we are now part of Condé Nast, Backchannel was created inside Medium, and some people who lost their jobs were our former colleagues, so the news was particularly saddening to us. But our business team at the Wired Media Group had already been selling ad content, so this does not affect us, anymore than a layoff at WordPress would affect a publication using that content management system. We’re still wide open for business and are anticipating 2017 will be a great year here.