Michael Silence and Uncle on the Tennessean accusing the Nashville City Paper of news laundering, after the City Paper linked an online lead story to a blog post which was linked to a Tennessean story. (Kleinheider has a piffy response . . . and Ryan Underwood, an editor at the Tennessean, fires right back in comments.)

It’s an interesting debate on proper credit by blogs. In this example, it appears that Kleinheider, the blogger who started it all, did the right thing. He pulled a short excerpt from the Tennessean story and included a link to the original story. That’s commonly accepted protocol in the blogosphere. What the City Paper (whose parent company owns Kleinheider’s blog) did is a little weird . . . okay, more than a little. But the bottom line is this: Anybody who is interested enough in the story in question (which was a piece on U.S. Sen. Bob Corker) is going to wind up at the Tennessean website.

What’s not to like about that?

I kinda like the idea of folks driving traffic to my website, but maybe that’s just me. If our competitors want to link to our stories, they’re more than welcome to do so.

This little debate exposes an entire line of arguments from newspaper publishers and editors who despise aggregators. Take, for instance, the Internet’s foremost aggregator, Matt Drudge. Drudge is able to habitually offend editors and publishers by linking to their materials.

For instance, Parade publisher Randy Siegel, who says (on the possibility of newspapers abandoning the web):

I could see The Huffington Post, Drudge Report and other aggregators collapse under their own weight as their lowly cut-and-pasters had to retype or scan in every newspaper article or column they wanted to pilfer and profit from. It would be revealing, and hilarious, on every level.

Am I missing something here? There has been more than one instance where a Drudge link to a smaller newspaper has caused the paper’s server to crash, because of the influx of traffic. And isn’t that what it’s all about? Folks flocking to your website to read your story? I fail to see how that’s a problem. Well, a crashed server would be a problem, but under those circumstances it would be a good problem to have.

Are aggregators profiting from their pilfering? Sure they are. But you’re benefiting from their pilfering, too. If your newspaper’s website draws 10,000 visitors a day, and the HuffPo or Drudge links to a story and you have 300,000 visitors come to you and read that story, how is that possibly a bad thing? Your benefit may be short-lived, but it’s a benefit nonetheless . . . isn’t it? Unless the aggregator is lifting all of your headlines, they’re certainly not pulling traffic away from your site.

As for Post Politics, it’s one of my daily reads . . . because I know if it involves Tennessee politics and it’s being said online, ACK will have it if it’s worth reading. By perusing Post Politics, I wind up clicking through to Tennessean stories fairly frequently. If those stories weren’t linked on Post Politics, I probably wouldn’t wind up at the Tennessean very often.

So. The City Paper’s Corker link. Weird? Definitely. Unethical? Probably closer to the proverbial fine line than I would want to trod. But at the end of the day, some folks undoubtedly read the Tennessean story–on the Tennessean’s website–than otherwise would have. I fail to see how that’s worth getting mad over.