On Monday, Colin Francis was fired from his job as weblog pundit because he published an article in a local newspaper.

Colin Francis was known to the weblog community only as the "power blogger" because his posts had that special punch. Most of his readers were shocked when they heard his blog would be discontinued as of this week.

One reader (who wants to stay anonymous) laments: "It's a totally new situation for us, to stare at the now empty walls of Colin's blog, and not see new posts pop up on a daily basis. I guess we have to read his stuff on paper now, but we don't really trust paper."

What happened? Colin did the one thing a weblogger is not expected to do – he published his thoughts in a so-called newspaper. Newspapers are large chunks of paper collected together in what many think of as a highly inaccessible format. (You can't find it in search engines or email it to friends, to name just two of the many defects.)

Colin's boss Frank D., who runs a large weblog framework overseeing many contracted writers explained the situation to us.

"One word: integrity. In this game of news and communication and having to maintain a large fan base, we can't risk losing the positive image of the blog brand. Bloggers writing for newspapers are simply [destroying] our reputation."

Says Colin: "Newspapers to most people are those things where they print lies in big bold letters and there's no way to easily add comments, unless you scribble them on the side of the article and leave the bundle on a park bench. That's simply not the whole story, and many just don't get it. To some extent I understand what my boss is saying, but whatever happened to freedom of speech?"

By FakeToday correspondent Philipp Lenssen (9/7/2004).