You may remember this from a few months ago -- the Washington Post wanted to create a network of local bloggers to provide content for the Washington Post. It was an unpaid gig, but bloggers would offer up a couple of paragraphs on the Post website, and readers could click through to the blogger's site to read the rest of the piece.

Well, it hasn't turned out that way.

But merely reprinting and linking to existing blog content is not the Post’s goal. Their real intention is to direct the bloggers to provide content that would only appear on the Post’s website. And the Post has been emailing its bloggers non-stop to get them to provide this free and exclusive work.

Click through the link above to read the Post's orders to the bloggers. In short, the Post has created a "workflow plan" requiring the bloggers to be on call on certain dates to provide original content, it's encouraging them to do original reporting, and it's even begun assigning stories to them.

It’s obvious what’s going on here. The Post has absolutely no intention of driving traffic to independent blogs. Instead, it wants the bloggers to concentrate on writing free, exclusive content for the Post [...] And the Post is getting all of this for FREE. Every paid reporter at the Post should be up in arms over this.

Absolutely. This fucks over the bloggers, and let's the Post get away without hiring more reporters (or even firing existing ones, if the program takes off).

The future of journalism might be hazy, but this certainly isn't the answer.