Rules of engagement online

Tonight I was talking to a friend who manages a number of websites with original content. He recently switched from being a mere aggregator to producing his own content and since then he is faced with some rather interesting issues.
It seems that while the well known ethics of journalism and public relations may work offline, this is not always the case online. Content he produces based on publicly available information is often the target of complaint by the companies mentioned who seem to believe that you can bully a website into changing info.
I think this would never happen to a newspaper, for one because once it's printed it's sort of final and you can't really do much [unless you're a psycho and you go out and buy the full print]. Also because, in the eye of the 'Internet illiterates', websites or blogs are not "serious" forms of content production UNLESS (and this is where it gets interesting) they carry content that was produced for offline and then republished online (like a newspaper's website for instance).
So basically original content online stands lower in the scale of trustworthiness or importance, or so it seems from what my friend tells me. This may explain why serious PR targeted online is lacking in Romania and also why we cannot seem to get some decent online projects off the ground in advertising.