How not to defend newspapers; Guardian, 7/15/09

Dan Kennedy via Guardian; How not to defend newspapers:

"How badly did the Cleveland Plain Dealer's Ted Diadiun screw up in his now-infamous video in which he disparaged bloggers as "pipsqueaks", wrongly claimed that blogs steal content and hailed newspapers as the only legitimate source of journalism?...

Diadiun is the Plain Dealer's "reader representative", a position roughly analogous to those held by New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt and Washington Post ombudsman Andy Alexander. That is, he is the paper's in-house critic, fielding complaints and comments from readers...

Diadiun's downfall began with a colleague's bad idea. On 5 July, he wrote approvingly of a column by Connie Schultz in which she promoted a proposal to change the copyright law. The proposal – similar to one advanced by federal appeals-court judge Richard Posner – would ban bloggers and aggregators from linking to copyrighted content without permission for 24 hours after publication...

He did stick to his guns on the need for news organisations to get paid for their content. On that many of us would agree – though the copyright revision of which he and Schultz are so enamoured is stunningly awful, and possibly a violation of the first amendment."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/jul/15/ted-diadiun-plain-dealer-bloggers