A wildly misguided idea to protect newspapers is emerging in Cleveland these days. (If you're already up to speed, skip to graf 4.)

It is an idea dreamt by the brothers David and Daniel Marburger (a lawyer-economist duo) and espoused by Cleveland Plain-Dealer columnist Connie Schultz. (I call them the Axis of Snivel.)

They propose amending federal copyright law to ban "aggregators" from paraphrasing or linking to their content in the first 24 hours.

Now, you can argue that is unconstitutional. You can argue it's impossible to enforce. You would be right. But of more interest is that the entire premise of the complaint will be turned on its head in the near future.

The premise of the argument is that newspapers are the "originators" of content, locked in an unfair battle against parasitic "aggregators" who repurpose it and take a freeloader's cut of traffic and advertising revenue.

The trend in reality, and it's accelerating by the way, is that NEWSPAPERS ARE THE AGGREGATORS. The original reporting of daily life now and in the future happens in social networks among peer groups. In many cases now, news breaks on Twitter and blogs. Newspapers come by second and fact check. How would the Cleveland P-D like it if their new copyright law prohibited them for 24 hours from reporting plane and train crashes, celebrity deaths, political scandals, or anything else that Twitter, TMZ, Talking Points Memo or the Drudge Report had first?

As professional news organizations shrink and the social web grows ubiquitous, the professionals are the ones left to aggregate, curate, verify and trendspot among the mass of social chatter and viewpoint blogs.

Any organization or company exists because it serves a valuable purpose. The valuable purpose of news professionals is changing. We used to need newspapers to give us original information. We had no way to know what was going on in the community unless the newspaper originated it. Now the problem is information overload. When endless data and discussion is streaming about, the value of the news organization is to make sense of what we're all hearing already.

That's a perfectly good role that offers a solid future for professional journalism. But it is decidedly different from the old world, and it is clear that some in the old media world are not ready for it.

Take, for example, the response from the Cleveland Plain-Dealer's "reader representative" Ted Diadiun. (Misnomer warning: Diadiun represents the paper TO the reader, not vice-versa as you would expect.)

Diadiun tackled the Schultz/Marburger backlash in his weekly video chat this week. His dismissive, talk-down-to-you explanations include this gem about 11 minutes into the clip: "It's really a bunch of pipsqueaks out there (on the Internets) talking about what the real journalists do."

The columnist Schultz's own column on July 5 responding to criticism began, "When you write a column and immediately become the target of numerous bloggers, you suspect you're on to something."

If Schultz & Friends don't grow respect for and get plugged into the social/blog network of news, pretty soon they will be irrelevant. And still wondering why.