Connie lifted the embargo! I'm free to talk today!

Well, the good news is that Connie claims that the Plain Dealer's proposal wouldn't implicate yours truly, so I'm apparently free to discuss the web chat with Connie today without a fear of a frivolous lawsuit.  Let's be clear what this was: a newspaper holding a web event in order to capture attention and traffic to its site due to a controversy brewing in the blogsphere.  In short, a newspaper was trying to cash in on this bloggin' thang.  That's it.  If it were for damage control, it failed because I dare say nobody participating in it left with a changed mind.

First, the conflict of interest issue.  Connie brushed it off as saying it was considered but that it's not a problem.  Frankly, given that Connie stated in her column that this proposal is a legislative initiative supported by her employer, I don't see how Sherrod would have any choice but to abstain from voting on it if the opportunity ever arises.  So on one particular issue, Ohioans lost one of their votes in the U.S. Senate.  That's no small matter. 

She engaged in a strawman's argument that anyone who claimed that Sherrod suggested this proposal for her to write about was absurd.  Yes, such a person would be absurd.  So absurd, that I cannot find any example of anyone actually doing that. 

What Connie's column does make clear is that her corporate employer's lawyer came up with a legislative proposal that her employer supports in its own self-interest that she learned about from her employer and that she's now writing a call-to-arms to get Congress, where her husband serves, to make into law.  THAT is what some of us have had an ethical problem with: using a wife of a politician for corporate lobbying.  This isn't just some opinion piece where Connie is pushing a policy she personally supports.  She advocating for the adoption of government policy favored by a corporate interest.  She has, obviously, more than just a personal interest in the matter.  While I don't share the view that she should be required to register as a federal lobbyist as a result, I do think it's closer to that kind of activity than the average citizen's letter to the editor that she tried to make her column sound to be.

Second, the backpeddling.  Either Connie was uncharastically poor in her writing in defining what this proposal would implicate, or she's seriously trying to dial it back in the face of blistering criticism from the blogsphere.  Much of the webchat was spent in discussing who would NOT be implicited under the proposal: 1) Yahoo! 2) Google; and 3) bloggers who comment and "print limited excerpts of PD content with attribution and hyperlinks back to the PD website."  She said the proposal would only implicate those news "aggregator" sites which either: a) print without attribution in full PD content, or b) give such a sufficient summation of PD content that a reader is unlikely to click thru to the PD's site to read the full story.

I'm pretty sure existing law already protects them from a).  Given that this proposal is billed as "saving" the industry, I pressed Connie to give an example of b).  She cited only the website The Daily Beast.  A website that "print limited excerpts of PD content with attribution and hyperlinks back to the PD website.  In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find that The Daily Beast has even USED content from the Plain Dealer.  So when you actually review Connie's statements in the totality you either are left with the impression that the proposal either implicates so few sites it cannot possibly generate enough revenue through these licenses, or that its so ambiguous that its hard for people to know who does or does not truly need to enter into a contract to cite to PD's content.

And that's the genius of the proposal.  The standard is so ambiguous that many will sign fairly cheap contracts to avoid the threat of litigation even though they probably don't need it.  If it weren't essentially a legal extortion scheme, you'd almost admire its creativity.

The real unraveling came, though, when Connie was asked about her own use of other publications' work in her editorial columns (like the N.Y. Times or the Washington Post).  She gave the very rationalization of a blogger who does what I do, except her printed column doesn't have links to the source material.  And that's when it hit me.  Newspaper reporters aren't threatened by bloggers.  That's why when Matt Naugle posted video of shirtless Lee Fisher, they all swooned to report it.  But editorial writers and columnists are.  Connie would be hard-pressed to write relevant political columns if she had to operate under the very rules she seeks . . . at least in the printed version of her columns. 

Who in the Ohio Congressional delegation is going to introduce this legislation?  Is any of them going to even support it if if comes to a vote?  That's a story the Plain Dealer won't report.  Because for all the bandwidth Connie and the PD used up today to defend her column, there are two realities that escape them: 1) even if this proposal were law today, they'd still be out of business in six months; 2) there's no way in hell this is ever going to be made into law because its too unpopular, too unworkable, and too ineffective.

Connie breathlessly echoed the arrogance of a dying industry that holds its emerging replacement in contempt.  She claimed that it was impossible that the reporter who broke the story leading to the Cuyahoga Sheriff's resignation could not done so as a blogger.  Since Connie admitted being a fan of mine, which is mutual by the way despite our present disagreement, she surely had already read that I knocked that point down by citing Talking Points Memo work on the U.S. Attorney scandal and Huffington Post's reporting about Iran.

In fact, many of the newspapers who have been announced as "deceased" are in existence in a purely online format.  They just don't have the bloated payrolls they had when they were in print.

In the end, my first question was the most revealing.  I asked whether the fact that they were responding to this via a video web chat as opposed to a printed column a concession that printed media is dead as an effective medium for timely distribution of information.  The fact that Connie believes that her paper's online activities are designed to only augment their printed functions shows a misguided viewpoint as to the future of her industry.  Another commenter echoed the "augmented" argument and claimed that if it weren't for the printed column, we wouldn't have had anything to chat about.

Except I only learned about Connie's column from blogs, and I've only seen it on the Internet.  That's the most likely way Connie's columns will ever be read outside Cuyahoga County.  The second the Plain Dealer realizes that its their printed version that's holding them back, and not the Internet, the sooner they'll be on a road to economic stability.