By King Kaufman: A week after Cleveland Plain Dealer "reader representative" Ted Diadiun lit up Future of Journalism nerdworld with a video chat in which he referred to the blogosphere as "a bunch of pipsqueaks out there talking about what the real journalists do," we have a sequel.

This week's video chat at Cleveland.com features the Plain Dealer's news impact editor, John Kroll, stepping in to "debate" Diadiun about his views about online news and the survival of newspapers. Diadiun has expressed support for the idea of tightening copyright law to protect newspapers, the subject of a column by the Plain Dealer's Connie Schultz that formed the background of last week's chat.

I watched the 19-minute chat so you don't have to. But you should. It's fun to watch Diadiun concede most of his argument without even realizing he's doing so.

Kroll begins by explaining that "news impact editor" means he's an online editor, then shows a clip of Diadiun's now-famous "pipsqueak" comment. He says, "So Ted: Pipsqueaks. Good thing that we in the mainstream media aren't snarky in our comments, right?"

Diadiun's answer: "Given some of the things that I've read directed toward me and that I've been called before on blogs, it's ironic that the word pipsqueak would get people that charged up. I think there's a question of dishing it out and then taking it. But that's fine."

Not an encouraging start.

It is not a question of dishing it out and then taking it. If you talk stupid nonsense, you're going to get called on it. That's not a matter of your critics not being able to "take it." You don't get a free pass to say something idiotic about someone just because they've criticized you in the past. We're not even three minutes into this "debate" and Diadiun is already signaling that he's not going to engage.

Diadiun backs off enough to say that he used the word "pipsqueaks" light-heartedly, though he stands by it, and he acknowledges Kroll's offline point that "They're not bloggers, they're people." Diadiun admits that "some of my best friends" are bloggers, and he wasn't talking about them. Just people who disagree with him. "I was talking about the people who were mainly taking issue with our efforts to protect our content."

Kroll says he doesn't really have a problem with the word pipsqueak, but, "When you said it, it didn't come across as if you were saying, 'This guy and that guy are pipsqueaks.' It really sounded like you were saying, 'All the bloggers out there are pipsqueaks.'"

Diadiun replies that there are two things you'll notice if you watch his video chats. "One is that there's a very good reason that I went into newspapers and not into television," he says. I find self-deprecation obnoxious when it's an obvious strategy of the self-important, but I have to admit it's an acknowledgment that some attempt at softening the arrogance is called for, and that's something.

But in this case it's also a cop-out. Everything else Diadiun said in that chat supported the point of view that he thinks of bloggers as pipsqueaks. And in the first, now, four and a half minutes of this one, even given the opportunity, he hasn't said anything to disabuse anyone of the notion that he meant what he said and he said what he meant.

The other thing you'll see in his chats, Diadiun says, is his passion for newspapers and his fear that the good work they do will go away "if we don't protect our franchise."

Diadiun then spends about a minute explaining that he doesn't speak for the paper, that his opinion is his own. "Not only do I not speak for anyone here," he says, "aggressively it's the other way around. I speak for the readers."

Right. The readers are aggressively saying, "We don't want free content! Protect the Plain Dealer franchise!" I'm glad Diadiun is here to speak for those readers, because otherwise I'd have missed that.

Kroll then starts a new tack, first noting that he is with Diadiun in valuing the work newspapers do and not wanting to see them go away. He then says he disagrees with Diadiun's point that "there's no other news out there, almost all of it comes from newspaper newsrooms."

He says that if you look at the entire blog universe, including silly personal blogs, dead blogs and so on, "sure, the number of blogs that produce news and the amount of news they produce is small, but if you looked at the entire ink-on-paper world -- the grocery lists, the travel brochures, the product labels -- and then said, 'In ink-on-paper there's not a lot of news,' I think you could say the same thing. The fact is there is a lot of news out there and it's getting bigger."

Then Kroll points out a lawyer-blogger in Cleveland, Russ Bensing, who blogs about local appeals court decisions, "and he goes into more detail and has more experience and knowledge of the law than anybody here in this newsroom brings to bear, and he's doing a great job." There are limitations, Kroll admits -- when Bensing goes on vacation, the blog stops -- but considering bloggers like Bensing and sites like Politico, "when you say there's no other news out there, somebody like me, who's looking at what's out there, I really can't buy that."

Diadiun says, "I have to appeal to your expertise on this because you spend a whole lot more time looking at these sites than I do." Then he says that most of what you see out there -- that is, when you're not looking that hard, as Diadiun has just admitted is the case -- is "just people expressing opinions about things that originated with print reporters."

Translation: I'm really not listening here. He pulls out the old "you don't see bloggers and news aggregators standing there next to our reporters gathering this information" line, to which Kroll says, "I can hear the bloggers across Northeast Ohio and the country raising objections as you speak."

Kroll then patiently explains, over the course of about two minutes, why it was complete hogwash when Diadiun said that if the newspapers went away, there wouldn't be any news. This point is so obvious and self-evident that I'll just skip it. It starts at about the 11-minute mark if you're interested. It's worth watching.

Diadiun responds by conceding most of his argument: "Well, that's a reasonable point," he says.

Then he goes on: "One of the other things that I'm greatly concerned about with the future of newspapers is the trust factor and the reach factor, and the fact that people know, when they pick up their paper off the front porch in the morning, it's got this whole newsroom, the newspaper's reputation, everything they know about their ability to trust and believe what it said and what it stands for, whether they like it or not, and trust that if we get something wrong it'll be in the correction area the next day. All of that has so much value to people as far as being able to know where to find things and believe when it's true."

Diadiun says that with all due respect to another local blogger Kroll had praised a few moments earlier, "most of the people have never heard of him. They don't know whether to trust him or not, they don't know him from some other person who's making anything up out of whole cloth."

And then he concedes that argument too, though he doesn't seem to realize it: "And I suppose after a while you build up the same kind of reputation with a blog."

Keep talking, Ted. You're doing great.

Diadiun changes the subject then to where he says this started, which is a Pew study saying more than half of the people get their news without paying for it. "I don't know how much longer that can go on," he says, "where we have a whole newsroom full of professionals who know how to get news, who know how to use FOIA and have the clout of the newspaper behind them, who have the editorial page that people pay attention to. I don't know where all that comes from without what we do here."

So because Ted Diadiun, who doesn't really read much online, can't figure out "where all that comes from without what we do here," it must not be possible to get "all that" without what the Plain Dealer people "do here." He wants us to see his lack of imagination as some kind of expertise.

I can't figure out how to get the grass to grow in my backyard. Therefore, we're all doomed to a future without grass.

If Diadiun had listened to Kroll's two-minute lecture about where news comes from, or if he'd listened to his own reply to that lecture, he might have some idea where "all that" will be coming from in the years ahead.

Without the newspaper, Diadiun rambles on, "I don't know who keeps an eye on the politicians and their tax money and how anyone knows that is being overseen."

I don't know about you, but I'd have a lot more respect for this whole idea of the newspaper industry as the great government watchdog if the watchdogging actually happened a little more often.

Finally, Kroll tweaks Diadiun for his dimwitted comments suggesting that Jeff Jarvis -- whom Diadiun had referred to as "this guy," even though Jarvis is a respected author and blogger who helped design Cleveland.com -- was some nobody who got a windfall of attention from Connie Schultz's column. Diadiun once again says he's sure Schultz has more readers, drawing an eye roll and "let's agree that they're both important in their fields" from Kroll, then admits he shouldn't have said what he said without researching the matter, since he wouldn't have done the same in his column.

Kroll finishes with a statement that the Plain Dealer intends to be a part of the digital future in its region, and that it plans to treat everyone else in the field with respect.

"Amen to that," Diadiun says.

In which case, he has a lot of work to do.