Post says it's really, really sorry to Spacing

The recent appropriation of an item from the Spacing magazine's "Spacing Wire" by the National Post has been pretty thoroughly covered by both a longish item in Masthead online, by Spacing itself and by uber-blogger Antonia Zerbisias in her blog for the Toronto Star. Rather than raking it over, here is a very thorough summary from Spacing itself. Of greatest interest were the comments on all sides of the issue from readers and other bloggers.

It seems that the National Post is keen on paying attention to blogs because it is hip and new and a good way of finding out what is going on out there. Also because it holds the promise of not costing much (which is no small thing when you're losing as much money as the Post is). There seemed to be large dollops of ham-fisted inadvertence in the way the story was presented in the pages of the Post, either as something they commissioned, or as something with which Spacing collaborated. Neither of which was the case.

One of the most contentious aspects was that the Post changed the tone and argument of the story and hacked out any references to things like comments from Globe and Mail columnist John Barber. But there seemed to be some significant degree of contrition in the fact that the Post apologized, and paid a fee to associate editor Shawn Micaleff to make the matter go away.