LA Times: Our way or the litigation way

According to Gawker, the Los Angeles Times's publisher, Eddy Hartenstein, "is telling LAT reporters that leaking memos about the troubled newspaper's internal doings to blogs is 'treason" -- and he's threatening to sue those who do it:

[S]olid sources have let me know that current Times leadership is unhappy enough (or paranoid enough) about stuff getting out to consider action against staffers. . . . So take precautions — use your personal email, our PO box, or pick up the phone — and don't presume they aren't watching. And be assured that I will continue to report accurately on the Times with your help and, as always, will never divulge my sources.

Hartenstein may be right, and there could even be some conceivable point at which divulging an internal memo to a blogger, or blogging it oneself, could be the basis of a bona fide legal claim. But the irony is great, considering the extent to which journalists, including real live ink-stained wretches themselves, rely on just that sort of trade to break open other institutions, business and people.

Blogging is the angle that the MSM never counted on -- the angle that renders MSM institutions as vulnerable, accountable and reportable as any other, and with the famous Internet twist: The more you try to squelch a story that hits the web, the bigger it gets...