I agree that provocative regular columnists and guest feature writers are the equivalent of bloggers, and his bold use of regular columnists' names is one of the things I like about his design. I guess that my original point was more that the tendency to editorialise in and around news articles themselves is widespread in modern news media (my perceptions being shaped by a UK print media that wears its biases on its sleeve) and the readers seem to demand it; it seems odd for a designer to come along and assert editors ought to separate anything with any semblance of commentary into a distinct section "separated from news" and apparently subordinate (at least in page position) to it.