Activism if necessary, but not necessarily activism

An object lesson for publishers who think that mixing new media and old ideas is easy:

The Cleveland Plain Dealer hired four well-known local bloggers to collaborate on a blog for the paper's website. Then one liberal blogger was let go because he had contributed to a political party. And another liberal blogger quit in sympathy. And then the paper shut the blog down. (The details of the story are reported at length in Editor & Publisher).

According to a posting by Jeff Jarvis over at Buzz Machine, the paper had a tortured explanation for the debacle and showed considerable discomfort about drawing a line between activism and involvement and notions of objectivity. Having sought out involved activists, the paper lost its nerve and, as Jarvis says, cast out the sinners...

What we’re really seeing is the view of journalism from inside the cloister of the newspaper: Once you take a dollar from the paper, once you take its communion, you are transformed: You take a vow of political celibacy. You have no opinions and if you do, you hold them to yourself, like impure thoughts. You don’t participate in your community but stand apart from it. And you don’t mingle with those outside the walls who speak the vulgate, blog. So the priests of the paper said that the bloggers were sinners. And they were excommunicated.