BLACKHEART Cleveland

Jeff Jarvis smells the plainly obvious rat.

First note well that Schultz is married to U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown as she calls on her newspapers and employer (my former employer, Advance Publications) and fellow columnists to influence Congress to remake copyright. She should be registered as a lobbyist. No joke.

Connie responds without addressing the wildly waving red flags, as is her wont, and Jarvis notices.

Well, you are lobbying Congress and you cannot ignore your uncomfortable position. I’m quite serious: You should register and disclose as a lobbyist. Read your column again. You are trying to influence Congress. Whether your husband is a sponsor of this effort at changing copyright law is irrelevant. Will he vote on it? Will he recuse himself? What is his stand? I want answers to those questions. Will you and he provide them?

Anastasia at ODB.

To me, this actually IS a blatant conflict of interest, and I hate that the PD is willing to put Schultz’s credibility on the line in service of their own business model, but is queasy about her speaking out on other issues. I find it more compromising for the paper than for Schultz, and I sincerely wish someone had advised her not to write a column in support of this flimsy, illogical and probably illegal desperation plan.

I’ve had a few fun exchanges at my blog with Ted Diadiun, the “reader rep” of the PD, and the PD attorney who drafted the laughable proposal.  And Modern Esquire at BSB jumps in big time.

Imagine the litigation there would have been on 9/11 by the newspapers to try to keep that story within it’s precious little 24-hour window.  America is attacked!  Learn more tomorrow!  Seriously?

And the idea that the Plain Dealer is losing money from bloggers is silly.  They’re losing money because they are a once-a-day publication in an instant update information environment.  They are the horse-drawn buggy makers competing against the Model T.  The monk scribes against the Gutenberg press…

Nothing says abuse of corporate power over the flow of information like having an employee, who just happens to be the wife of a sitting U.S. Senator, advocate the “great idea” for federal legislation her employer’s lawyer cooked up to save the business.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that this REALLY IS a good idea, not offensive in the least, not utterly at odds with the First Amendment, and that David Marburger’s proposal isn’t as pathetically weak as it plainly is.  Let’s also say for the sake of argument that it was even a good idea for the PD to use its editorial pages to advocate for it.  Let’s even assume that there would be no objection to this proposal, immediate or otherwise, and that it would have the slightest chance in hell of getting to a vote in Congress.  Let’s give the PD the beneift of EVERY DOUBT.

How on earth is it a good idea to then have Connie Schultz start the campaign in her own column, then implore her other colleagues to join her, in lobbying HER HUSBAND?  Wouldn’t you wall her off from the get go?  Do the big rollout from the anonymity of the editorial board?  Pick some other columnist?  No, let’s pick the one person on the paper’s staff who’s advocacy will be the most problematic.  Great success!

I suspect this will get worse for the PD, and specifically Connie, and it will be entirely of their own making.  Which also happens to be how they put their business model into this absurd jujitsu position in the first place.  I agree with Connie - six months is an eternity in the new media environment - plenty of time for her reputation to be utterly destroyed by her own hand, while the death of her newspaper is hastened.