First use of blog as primary reference in NZ Herald?

This story (the NASAgate incident going around at the moment) in the herald today is interesting. As far as i can tell, this is the first time a blog has been mentioned as a reference source in a wider story;

The Times and the scientificactivist.blogspot.com website reported that Deutsch, who worked on President George W. Bush's 2004 re-election campaign, lied about his college degree.

Now, i like blogs as much as the next guy (and i quite like the one mentioned since i was in Oxford during an animal rights march that he was discussing at the time), but the juxtaposition of The Times and [insert random blog here] implies to non-webbies that this blog thing must be like a newspaper.

The freedom of a blog to throw any old opinion out there vs a newspaper that has editorial and reputation protecting issues (hah!, if only they thought about that more often) is like giving evolutionists and creationists even space in a story to maintain 'balance'. Blogs need to be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism, roughly 5x as much as your average newspaper story oops- article, they have agendas to push: it's their raison d'etre.

Note to NZ Herald: You're playing with fire here, i hope you understand whats going on and you haven't just hired a wet behind the ears BSc graduate to do this scienc-y reporting thing.