Someday, when students study the twitching convulsive death of newspapers, and this very Cleveland-like episode in particular, one coincidence will jump out - that the PD’s top brass spent the entire period before, during, and after July 4, Independence Day, pimping a proposal to turn the First Amendment into their very own federally enforced cash cow of extortion just to keep their paychecks fat, and incoming.  And they quite purposefully used a Pulitzer prize winning wife of a US Senator to kick it off, pimp it, and push it for weeks.

Wherever he is, Edward R. Murrow probably just killed off a bottle of Jack Daniels by now, and is frantically asking around for something stronger.

It gets worse, of course.  Should those students decades from now dig any further into this period of time, they will also discover the PD’s simultaneous silence regarding a journalist in the PD’s own hometown, who has spent the last 3 months under assault from a sitting elected official who is also turning the First Amendment into a weapon against speech, using it to get journalists fired for reporting truth.

The hushed, stunned silence in that classroom decades from now will be deafening.

Much has been noted about the knee buckling arrogance of Ted Diadiun, Connie Schultz, the PD, and the newspaper industry itself, as they all clamor for a life raft, begging for sympathy even as they spit bile at the people holding the life preserver.  But while they whine, wheeze, and die in ever increasing spasms of dementia, media and news are regenerating at the speed of the internet, every single day.

The world these self-imporant incompetent toffs wish to stop from coming is already here, thriving, and will instantly take the place of every newspaper that dies in the coming months or years, without the slightest fanfare.  It’s all very American.

For example, this blog, BLACKHEARTCleveland, didn’t even exist three weeks ago - a period during which Connie, Diadiun, and the very top of the PD intelligentsia cooked up with their employer and their “First Amendment attorney” a frenzied display of breathtaking hubris aimed in direct assault at the First Amendment.  In those three weeks, as the PD desperately abandoned any pretense of protecting the rights by which their industry was given birth, this blog, and others, took up defense of that right, both in opposition to the PD’s laughable proposal, and in defense of a journalist who must wonder every day what it takes to get his local paper to give a fucking shit.

And we all did it for free.  On our own time.  For the sole reason that it was the right thing to do.

So fear not the end of newspapers.  They will come back someday, when they learn how to make money without extorting it from the First Amendment.  When their leadership stops acting like entitled trust fund babies pulling fat paychecks for almost no work.  When they stop selling their access and their souls.  When they jettison the worthless sagging driftwood of aging blowhards drawing absurd salaries in exchange for twice weekly opinion writing which was once the pinnacle of their “profession”, but is now just another hopelessly expensive luxury in a vast sea of opinions which are all free, all available with a single click, all more authentic, always more frequent, almost always better written, and just plain more valuable.

It’s called a free market of ideas.  What destroys the value of the product newspapers try to sell in this competitive marketplace is their own repulsive culture of self-entitlement, in all its sordid maniacal glory. If they lose that culture, and its endlessly varied putrid manifestations, newspapers will come back.  And they’ll be better newspapers, led by a new generation of journalists who remember what it once meant to be one - thanks to the lessons learned from studying the spectacular descent into oblivion this current detritus of parasites currently travel.

Until then, seeing this generation of the news industry’s corrupt and fetid walking dead disappear in a prancing flourish of self-important panic should bring us all joy, should be cheered on, accelerated, and laughed at.  Do enjoy it thoroughly, they deserve every ounce of disdainful mockery they have brought on themselves.

Because something better is on its way, and is probably already here.  You can find it right on your laptop, right now, in a matter of seconds.

To get to this universe, you have to assume that a bill to give news organizations 24 hour exclusivity over information, enforced by federal law, gets to the floor of the House, passes the House, passes the Senate, goes to conference committee, passes again, surviving the inevitable deluge of online advocacy against it, and in a brief moment of insanity suggesting he’s had a lobotomy, gets signed by President Obama. In fact, let’s pretend it happened on Monday, the day after Connie’s column, instead of taking the months to years such things normally take.

Before the ink is dry on the signature, every major internet media company files suit, followed by a coalition of left and right the likes of which not one human has ever imagined - think ACLU and PajamasTV as co-plaintiffs.  The law is enjoined in lieu of litigation that will last several years, winding up in the Supreme Court, while Connie’s job still disappears in the meantime.

BUT WAIT - THIS IS AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE.  Can’t we get rid of that, too?  OK, scratch it.

Let’s reprogram our spaceship time travel magic carpet Aladdin’s lamp LSD toadstool to AVOID that entirely, and pretend that all of this actually happened on Monday and NOT ONE PERSON OBJECTS AFTER THE FACT.

In other words, let’s pretend the incentive to contract with newspapers to get license to use their information in the first 24 hours is in place, unchallenged, federally enforceable, and the current state of incentive in the newspaper industry on July 1, 2009.

Who, exactly, is going to enter into those contracts?  Google?  Yahoo?  The Daily Beast?  The Huffington Post?  Some blogger in a basement at his mom’s house?  You get the picture.

So then, the PD has at its disposal a legel remedy!  Off to court we go, to enforce our 24 hour exclusivity.  Uh oh….messy litigation!   Looks like a court’s gonna have to take a careful look at this!  More months and years pass, the PD spending ever more money on litigation, chasing a few pennies from some kid in a basement, and Google.

In this universe, can someone explain to me how the PD still survives by the end of 2009?

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.

That is six months from now, which is a lifetime in an industry that, in the last six months, has slashed thousands of salaries and jobs. How much more time can we waste before we’re no longer an industry worth saving?

Schultz cites a paper proposing a change in the law written by the PD’s own attorney, David Marburger, even quoting Marburger, obliquely noting the somewhat important fact that he’s on the PD’s payroll.

David Marburger is a First Amendment lawyer at Baker Hostetler who has represented newspapers, including The Plain Dealer, for nearly 30 years.

In the very same edition of the paper, Marburger is also described as on the payroll, in another story on the Sunday front page.

Attorney David Marburger, who often represents The Plain Dealer on issues involving open meetings and public records…

Let’s look at Mr. Marburger’s paper.  Largely, it’s a litany of predictable MSM whining about the internet.  His proposal, as Connie describes it.

Ideally, news originators’ stories would be available only on their Web sites for the first 24 hours.

Stop laughing, and let’s go to the rationale, then you can laugh as hard as you want.  Marburger hangs the entire 51 pages on a case from 1918.

In 1918, the United States Supreme Court affirmed an injunction barring a for- profit news wire service from competing with the Associated Press in much the same way.   The International News Service allegedly rewrote uncopyrighted AP news dispatches arriving in New York, and sold them via telegraph and telephone to newspapers in the western states.   That enabled the INS dispatches to arrive out west at about the same time that AP’s original dispatches got there. Describing INS as misappropriating AP’s “quasi-property,” the Court decided that INS was unfairly competing with AP by free-riding on AP’s substantial journalistic costs. The injunction was not permanent.   It lasted only long enough for AP to exploit the highly-perishable commercial value of its own news reports before INS could exploit their substance.  That case is International News Service v. Associated Press, 248 U.S. 215 (1918).

Marburger himself even notes later in his paper that “courts generally have treated the INS ruling as weak, unreliable precedent.”  Not weak enough for the PD!  But weak enough to be wiped out by Congress explicitly in 1976, which Marburger dutifilly notes.

When Congress revised the copyright act in 1976, it added a provision — § 301 – that abolishes all state laws that function as copyright does.    A draft of the statutory revision had preserved the INS theory so that it was not subject to the copyright act’s pre-emption of state laws.   But the Justice Department objected, exaggerating the effect of the INS decision by arguing that it gave news organizations a “boundless monopoly” in factual information of public interest that the copyright act placed in the public domain.   The House then struck the exception.

The Justice Department seemed to think in 1976 precisely as Connie Schultz did yesterday in her piece!

Marburger anticipates the rebuttal: “Newspapers want to monopolize the truth.”

Marburger, having duly gutted the First Amendment with his proposal relying on a non-precedent, then posits the miracle world in which his clients CONTROL ALL NEWS PAY ME FOR IT NOW MOTHER FUCKER.

If used strategically by newspaper publishers and others who originate news reports, our recommended change to the copyright law would pressure aggregators to contract with originators of news reports to avoid the legal consequences of unjust enrichments suits.

Marburger is not essentially, but precisely proposing a state creation of a state news agency, enforced by law, forcing every other person on earth who wants to link to that news in the first 24 hours to pay for it.

The rest of Marburger’s paper reads like an autopsy of how the internet killed newspapers’ flawed business model, not news or newspapers, before the death even happens yet.   It’s as if the PD knows how fucked they are, is predicting it, and wants Congress to pass a law to stop their business from dying.

What Marbruger proposes isn’t just offensive on its face, it’s utterly unenforcable, as Marburger himself notes.

The injunction would last for a sufficient period of time to enable the originator to exploit the brief commercial life of its news reports before the aggregator can, and thus recoup the originator’s investment in journalistic services.

The goal, however, is not to indulge those remedies.  It is to create substantial legal and economic pressure on the aggregators to compete fairly with news originators in the market for advertising revenue.  Eventually, that should lead to contracts, not lawsuits.

Get that?  Marburger admits that enforcing his new law after the fact is kinda impossible, it’s the FEAR of being sued that will FORCE the internet aggregators to enter into CONTRACTS with his CLIENT.  This is a fantasy land. If you want to see what that fantasy really looks like, here’s the full PDF, download it, put on some early Syd Barrett Pink Floyd, sit back, burn one, and enjoy the trip!

This is what happens when you’ve spent your career cloistered in some other world.  A Pulitzer prize winning columnist Connie Schultz, who happens to be married to a US Senator, openly campaigns for federal legislation designed by her employer’s attorney, whose status as such she barely notes, whose proposal relies on ancient long overturned precedent to create a federal fiat ordering people to contract with her employer so she doesn’t lose her job.  All the while urinating on the First Amendment.

You couldn’t make this up if you tried.  That cat’s something I can’t explain.