Congressman LaTourette gets blogger fired

The Newhouse family of newspapers and websites - OregonLive.com, MassLive.com, Cleveland.com, NOLA.com - have been scrambling to add blogs to their media mix. Their regular journalists now often write blogs, and the papers have all been adding freelance bloggers as well.

In Cleveland, the Plain Dealer hired two conservative activists and two progressive activists to blog together on a blog called Wide Open.

But today, we hear the news that Congressman Steve LaTourette (R) managed to convince the Plain Dealer to fire one of its progressive bloggers, Jeff Coryell Why? Apparently, because he'd made a $100 donation to the Democratic challenger.

Unbelievable. Here's the relevant posts:

Jeff Coryell's version - posted at Ohio Daily Blog.

The PD's version, posted by the paper's Assistant Managing Editor

The post by progressive blogger Jill Miller Zimon, in which she resigns in protest

And the two posts by the conservative bloggers, Tom Blumer and Dave from Nixguy, who aren't happy about it either - as it seems to have ended this experiment in newspaper-sanctioned partisan blogging: "This post isn't as much a resignation as it is an observation that the whole thing has sort of blown up, and it looks like there's nothing left to resign from."

Ugh.