Full disclosure: Like Cleveland blogger Jeff Coryell, I too have made a small donation to the congressional campaign of Bill O'Neill, running to unseat incumbent Steve LaTourette in Ohio's 14th District. Free Times rules don't prohibit it as they do at the Plain Dealer. And it was at the PD that traditional ground rules aimed at maintaining a perception of reporter neutrality came into conflict with the brand-new world of blogs. The dust-up, triggered by Congressman LaTourette's obsession with who's donating to his opponents, is another chapter in the ongoing attempt by traditional media to adjust to the advent of Internet information distribution.

This past summer, PD online editor Jean Dubail began conversations with area bloggers about a new feature on its Web site, cleveland.com. The result was Wide Open, which debuted on Sept. 24 and featured four established local bloggers, two from the left end of the political spectrum, two from the right. Jeff Coryell of Ohiodailyblog.com and Jill Miller Zimon of Writeslikeshetalks.com represented the progressive side; Tom Blumer of Bizzyblog.com and Dave Stacy of Nixguy.com represented conservatives.

On Oct. 30, Coryell was terminated for violating a rule that Coryell, Zimon and Stacy all agree had not been part of Wide Open's original ground rules and seems to contradict its raison d'etre: He had made a pair of contributions to opponents of LaTourette's.

Zimon immediately quit - she too had made political contributions. And although both conservative bloggers say they have not made contributions to campaigns, Stacy had an agreement with Congresswoman Jean Schmidt (R-2nd district) to post her press releases on his site if he deemed them newsworthy.

In the flurry of online hand-wringing that followed, those who supported the PD's action missed one essential point: the no-contributions rule was intended to maintain the appearance of print reporters' impartiality, but the Wide Open bloggers were hired because they are not impartial.

In October 2006, Coryell took Congressman LaTourette to task on Ohiodailyblog.com over some other contributions: "Records show that LaTourette has received large amounts of campaign cash from the Ratner family of Cleveland, of the Forest City real estate empire, who recently received a colossal development contract from a federal agency supervised by a LaTourette-chaired Congressional subcommittee."

Coryell speculates that this may have played a role in the recent controversy, which began when PD Washington correspondent Sabrina Eaton called LaTourette, among others, to comment on what the retirement of veteran Congressman Ralph Regula (R-16th district) would mean for Ohio's delegation.

"When we finished talking," Eaton tells Free Times, "I asked him as I always do when I have someone on the line, 'Is there anything else going on?' Bill O'Neill had just filed his financial report for the third quarter. [LaTourette] mentioned that Jeff Coryell, who was writing for our Web site, had donated to Bill O'Neill's campaign and asked what our policy on that was. I told him I wasn't involved with that and he would need to talk to the editors back in Cleveland. I didn't have to tell him who to talk to; he knows them all very well."

LaTourette spoke to editorial page director Brent Larkin, who apparently relayed his concern to Jean Dubail. (Contacted by Free Times, Dubail wouldn't talk on the record, saying, "I'm all talked out.")

"Jean found out about it and brought it up in a conference call," says Coryell. "It was all of us and Jean and [online editor] Chris Jindra. In those conversations, LaTourette's displeasure with my participation came up."

They kicked around solutions, including posting disclosures should they write about a campaign they've been involved in. Ultimately, word got up to PD editor Susan Goldberg; Dubail relayed to Coryell that not writing about LaTourette's district at all was a condition of Coryell's continued involvement in Wide Open. He refused.

Goldberg and Dubail have both insisted in numerous interviews and emails last week that LaTourette's pressure was not the reason they tried to limit Coryell.

"We didn't bow to any political pressure," said Goldberg in an Oct. 30 e-mail received by buckeyestateblog.com. "Had we known that he had contributed to the opponent of a person he was writing about, we wouldn't have hired him in the first place. Once we learned of the issue, we asked him not to write about the congressman he opposed. When he refused, we decided that we couldn't pay him any longer to blog for us."

"I find that unconvincing," says Coryell. "I feel like it was essentially about LaTourette's complaints and not about developing a policy for bloggers. It just doesn't make sense as a policy for bloggers. I think what we need to be compared to is op-ed writers or columnists who are paid for editorial contributions. They express points of view and I don't think anyone cares if they contribute to candidates."

Though the issue loomed large enough to result in Coryell's termination, the paper apparently did no vetting of the bloggers, nor did editors seem to be aware of any other conflicts of interest, save Coryell's two donations (totaling $150) to two LaTourette opponents. Coryell points out that he's made many donations "to the Democratic national committee, the state party, the county party, I gave to Sherrod Brown, Jennifer Brunner, a local school board race. My wife and I gave a large amount to Strickland."

Yet he was only asked not to write about anything involving LaTourette (about whom he'd never written at Wide Open anyway). Were a no-contributions policy applied evenly, it would have left Coryell with little to write about. Zimon said she felt the same. "I gave to Marc Dann and Sherrod Brown. So I would not have been able to write about them."

Zimon says that when the bloggers were hired, "There were no ground rules. We were told repeatedly, unfiltered, unedited, uncensored, whatever you think. The idea was we would monitor each other and we would monitor ourselves."

And though it has nothing to do with blogging, it's worth pointing out that Plain Dealer publisher Terrance Eggar joined the board of the Cleveland Clinic while the paper was running extensive coverage of the Medical Mart proposal, a pet Cleveland Clinic project. Is that less indicative of bias than a $100 campaign contribution from a blogger?

The traditional media are locked in a strange dance with news-oriented blogs; fearful of the inroads that online sources are making on the circulation of "dead tree" media, the mainstream press alternately embrace and scoff at bloggers.

Eaton points out a potential problem with partisan online features at a traditional daily's Web site: "If you get to it through Google, it just leads you to that page and you don't know that that writer has a bias. It just says Plain Dealer Wide Open. A politician could take a quote from Wide Open and put it in their literature and attribute it to the Plain Dealer." It's a valid concern, yet anything in the paper, from an op-ed to a quote from a fanatic can be - and in instances has been - taken out of context and attributed to the paper it appeared in.

"Traditional journalists think trust is in their favor but it's not," says Zimon. "I believe it's tipping in the other direction. People prefer to trust their own instincts and trust a blogger who says they're partisan rather than a reporter who [readers] don't know where they stand, or what questions they didn't ask."