So much to say. It’s clear that Cleveland Plain Dealer Reader Representative Ted Diadiun doesn’t represent readers who have computers. It’s astoundingly clear also that he knows little to nothing about blogs.
Last week, Connie Schultz, whose work I greatly respect — particularly her strong work for equality — wrote a column pitching a newspaper lawyer’s proposal to change copyright law to limit the ability of blogs to take information from a newspaper’s Web site for a period of time — suggested is 24 hours — after publication. Jeff Jarvis, at BuzzMachine, responded in full force.
Today, Ted did a little Web chat — that, incidentally, involved no chat with any readers — to promote, basically, the idea that bloggers don’t do any original research or reporting and, once he admits that some blogs actually do just that, that blogs don’t have any real reach anyway, so they’re irrelevant without the reach of newspapers.
But don’t trust my take, here are his words [with my italicized comments in brackets]:
There was a Pew Institute study that was done last year that said last year was the first time more people got their news for free off the Internet than paid for it by buying newspapers and magazines. [Does he not realize that a significant portion of that includes newspapers and magazines that have their content online "for free"?] And that’s a difficult situation. [The large Ceasars Windsor and Cleveland Museum of Art advertisements right next to the Web chat video on Cleveland.com were a nice juxtoposition.]
That doesn’t mean the news didn’t originate with newspapers, because it did. [Note the definitive nature of this initial statement.] Any news that you find on the Internet that you can find on almost any site [Any site? Hedging?] that you can trust and believe and is well-researched and, watchdog process and everything else, chances are [More hedging.] it started off with a print reporter with a notebook and a pencil and a wealth of knowledge and experience in how to gather information, how to hold public officials’ feet to the fire, how to gather background and report all of the — everything is being done by the government with your tax money and your faith, it all comes from newspapers. [Did Palin write this?]
Without that, I don’t know where the bloggers and Internet Web sites would even get their stuff. [Well, golly, gee, I don't know, Mr. Diadiun. In the past month alone, I've attended hearings of the Ohio General Assembly; read legislative proposals, court filings and judicial opinions; and picked up the phone to talk with folks.]
He went on to show that the last time he read anything about Web traffic was sometime before the 2000 election:
There is the wider reach that we have, both through the newspaper and through our newspaper Website, Cleveland.com, which has a much larger reach than really anybody else. [This sounds definitively vague or vaguely definitive, I'm not sure which.]
Connie wrote about the original proposal two weeks ago, er, a week ago. And yesterday, she wrote about the reaction that her column has gotten and spent sometime rebutting something a guy [Jeff Jarvis has been one of the leading "new media" talkesr and writers since I first began blogging in 2003.] who’s taken it upon himself to support online news dissemination and public journalists at the expense of print and gave him a lot of ink in her column, which I thought was kind of unfortunate because, uh, you know, Connie’s column is read by 25,000 or 30,000 people a month, which is — has to be — many more times than this guy gets on his blog. [My far smaller blog empire here at Law Dork had more than 38,500 page views in the month of June.] And she gave him more publicity through that column than he would get on his own, anytime. [No, you are insanely wrong.]
I mentioned that there was a big reaction from the blogosphere to Connie’s column last week. A big reaction in the blog world is maybe 100 people, maybe 20 or 30 people responding and most of those are snarky comments that really don’t add a lot to the debate anyway. [My post on Obama and LGBT equality, albeit with Sullivan and Reynolds links, has received more than 6,000 views and has more than 60 comments in the 24 hours since it was posted.] It’s really a bunch of pipsqueaks out there talking about what the real journalists do, and I think that we do need to find a way to grab hold of our content and get paid for what we do . . . . [My post linked to Andrew Sullivan's Sunday column from the Times of London, and Andrew later linked to my post analyzing his column and applying its logic to a different topic.]
What a misinformed dolt.
My question of the night: Who is further from reality, Sarah Palin or Ted Diadiun?
Popularity: 1% [?]
Chris Geidner is a lawyer in Washington, D.C., who writes at Law Dork, contributes regularly to Metro Weekly and has written for The Atlantic Online, Advocate.com, Salon and other publications. An extended biography can be found
Aren’t you happy the PD isn’t your local paper?
His argument that all news (C) comes from Lois Lane hitting the beat would be a lot easier to swallow if we didn’t have a still-warm example disproving him. Eight days ago, Ft. Worth’s Rainbow Lounge was raided, resulting in police brutality that injured several and put one man in the hospital. By the time the local print media published their first report 24 hours later, we already had a reliable, consistent, researched understanding of what happened in nearly minute by minute detail because of reports by witnesses and victims to bloggers.
I got a chance to watch the video. I have no idea who Tim Russo is (And now I see his name on the comment above mine. I should pay better attention.), but it seems odd and more than a little self-serving for this “Reader Representative” to ignore an important question because he doesn’t like the questioner, and then change the subject.
And yeah, this guy is pretty far from reality. No snark intended, I have a feeling he understands the internet about as much as Ted Stevens. Interesting publisher talking points, though.