How badly did the Cleveland Plain Dealer's Ted Diadiun screw up in his now-infamous video in which he disparaged bloggers as "pipsqueaks", wrongly claimed that blogs steal content and hailed newspapers as the only legitimate source of journalism?

Here's how badly. This past Monday, a week after his self-immolation, Diadiun came in on his day off – just hours before the rehearsal dinner for his daughter's wedding – to eat a healthy helping of crow, served to him by an amiable but appalled colleague whose task was to walk Diadiun back from the brink and undo at least some of the damage.

Diadiun, semi-contrite, probably played the hand he'd been dealt – that he'd dealt himself – about as well as he could. The wonder is that he could have unleashed such a boneheaded amalgam of arrogance and ignorance in the first place.

Diadiun is the Plain Dealer's "reader representative", a position roughly analogous to those held by New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt and Washington Post ombudsman Andy Alexander. That is, he is the paper's in-house critic, fielding complaints and comments from readers. He writes a column that appears in the Sunday paper and sits for a live, 15- to 20-minute webcast from the newsroom on Mondays.

Diadiun's downfall began with a colleague's bad idea. On 5 July, he wrote approvingly of a column by Connie Schultz in which she promoted a proposal to change the copyright law. The proposal – similar to one advanced by federal appeals-court judge Richard Posner – would ban bloggers and aggregators from linking to copyrighted content without permission for 24 hours after publication.

The next day, Diadiun expanded on that theme in his webcast. "As soon as we get the newspaper on our website, it's fair game for any website, blogger or anybody else to put it on their own website for free," he said. "It all comes from newspapers, and without that I don't know where bloggers and internet news sites would even get their stuff."

He expressed the view that Schultz should not have responded to criticism from new-media advocate and Guardian contributor Jeff Jarvis (whom he could not bring himself actually to name), claiming that her 25,000 to 30,000 monthly readers "has to be many times more than this guy gets on his blog". (Web measurements are notoriously unreliable. But according to Compete.com, Jarvis's blog, Buzz Machine, attracted nearly 67,000 unique visitors last month.)

Diadiun also dismissed bloggers as "a bunch of pipsqueaks out there talking about what the real journalists do". And when he was asked to respond to a reader who wanted to know if he could identify any examples of blogs that have posted the full text of Plain Dealer articles, Diadiun disparaged the questioner, with whom he had apparently tangled before, as someone who "doesn't play fair". Diadiun then ran out the clock by praising the wonders of the obit page for the remainder of the webcast.

Whew. "Bonfire of the curmudgeons", wrote New York University's Jay Rosen on his widely read Twitter feed. Writing for Salon, King Kaufman proclaimed Diadiun's performance to be "a stunning example of newspaper-industry hubris and cluelessness". I posted the video on my blog, Media Nation, and sent Diadiun an e-mail asking him to respond to a few polite (more or less) questions. Crickets are chirping.

To his credit, Diadiun played nice this past Monday with the Plain Dealer's "News Impact" editor, John Kroll. Diadiun admitted, essentially, that he didn't know what he was talking about when he claimed that bloggers don't do original reporting, and that he shouldn't have guessed at Jarvis's readership without checking.

He did stick to his guns on the need for news organisations to get paid for their content. On that many of us would agree – though the copyright revision of which he and Schultz are so enamoured is stunningly awful, and possibly a violation of the first amendment.

The point has been made so many times by me and others that I suppose I ought to program a macro to save myself the bother of typing it again. In linking to, briefly quoting from and commenting on content they find on other websites, bloggers and aggregators are driving traffic to those sites, including the Plain Dealer's, which received some 1.3 million unique visits last month.

It is an unfortunate fact of life that web advertising has not proved particularly lucrative. But whenever Google News or a blogger sends readers to the Plain Dealer's website, Cleveland.com, the number of people who see the site's advertising goes up. That's why programmers for most news sites try to optimise their results on Google searches, and why virtually no one inserts the code Google makes available to exclude their sites from such searches.

Ted Diadiun is no doubt a good guy. His love of newspapers, and of newspapering, is palpable. But the reader representative, of all people, needs to understand the forces that are transforming his business.

At a time when the very survival of newspapers, whether in print or online, is in some doubt, the last thing we need is a supposed advocate for readers whose real agenda, it would seem, is allegiance to a way of newsroom life that was out of date five years ago.

Journalists can either take part in the conversation or consign themselves to irrelevance. Ted Diadiun has made his choice. For the sake of the news business, let's hope there aren't too many out there who still think like he does.