Ian Shapira’s essay in yesterday’s Washington Post does what good journalism is meant to do: it puts a human face on a broad problem.

In this case, however, the face in question is Shapira’s. The WaPo staff writer—he covers, broadly, Generation Y for the paper—recently wrote an article about Anne Loehr, a “business coach” who leads seminars for mostly-Baby Boomer clients on how to connect with members of the millennial generation. The piece—which was about 1,500 words long and which took, Shapira estimates, about two solid days to report and write—was picked up by Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan, who condensed it, quoted liberally from it, slapped a Gawkerized headline (“‘Generational Consultant’ Holds America’s Fakest Job”) on it, and made only the most cursory nods at attribution for the Post, never mentioning Shapira himself. The Gawker version garnered some 9,500 page views, Shapira notes (that number is currently at 11,000+).

Shapira’s essay—the tale of “How Gawker Ripped Off My Newspaper Story” (elsewhere: “The Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition)”)—is a Socratic dialogue-unto-itself, a conversation engaged in by two characters of the same name: Ian Shapira the Washington Post writer, and Ian Shapira the Washington Post staffer. Shapira-the-writer is, he notes, initially thrilled with the Gawker pickup. “I confess to feeling a bit triumphant,” he notes. The Gawker piece “featured several quotations from the coach and a client, and neatly distilled Loehr’s biography—information entirely plucked from my piece. I was flattered.”

But Shapira-the-Washington Post-staffer…not so thrilled. Shapira-the-staffer cares—or, more accurately, is made to care—about the bottom line. (“They stole your story,” Shapira’s editor tells him, igniting indignation. “Where’s your outrage, man?”) He wants recognition, but not merely through the vagueness of attribution or the imprecise compensation of credit-via-link. He wants monetized attribution—attribution that will help, in turn, pay his salary and contribute to his 410k. He wants to be remunerated for the troubles he’s gone to to create the story in question. So: he nitpicks. He nickels-and-dimes. He measures his worth as much by the hours he’s spent working as by the result of those hours. He defines his impact not by the fuzzy metric of “attention,” or even by the slightly-less-fuzzy metric of the links his piece has garnered, but by the revenue that comes from those online reverberations. Or, you know, the lack thereof.

It should go without saying that Shapira-the-writer, in this particular piece, is infinitely more likable than Shapira-the-staffer. The former is laid-back and fun and charmingly idealistic about the Web and his place within it. He is motivated by attention, to be sure, but for him attention is a function of his broader contribution to the Web’s storied marketplace of ideas. He is happy, then, to share his contribution with others. Mi story es su story.

Shapira-the-staffer, on the other hand, is crotchety and possessive, the kind of person, one imagines, who carries a tip calculator in his wallet and, as principle, never leaves anything beyond 11 percent. For him, journalism is a zero-sum game, and any ineffable joy that may be derived from the business of reporting and writing is subsumed by the commercial demands of the bottom line. He refers to that business as “labor,” with no trace of irony.

In all that, Shapira-the-amalgam makes a fairly fitting allegory for most every journalist still practicing right now: a giddy mix of gratification-at-still-being-employed, and fear-that-the-employment-will-prove-all-too-finite. So, then: who’s right? Which approach, applied to the paid content conversation, is the correct one to adopt?

The frustrating answer is that both of them are. Each side of Shapira, here, represents a valid side in the free/paid content debate. The conclusion he reaches at the end of his pseudo-dialectic conveys that mutual correctness through compromise itself: “I still want a fluid blogosphere,” he writes, “but one where aggregators—newspapers included—are more transparent about whom they’re heavily excerpting. They should mention the original source immediately. And if bloggers want to excerpt at length, a fee would be the nice, ethical gesture.”

Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. She was formerly a CJR staff writer.