Thought experiment: What happens when reposting public content?

There is an interesting post over at Slashdot right now, and while it is addressed at copyright issues I think that it can profitably be thought about in terms of privacy as well. In the post, we read:

In 2005, a college student published a rant on her hometown on her MySpace page, beginning with, “The older I get, the more I realize how much I despise Coalinga.” Her former high school principal found the rant while browsing her MySpace page (what?), and forwarded it to the town newspaper, which published the “rant” without the girl’s permission, signed with her full name, as a letter to the editor (what?). The resulting fallout included death threats against the family and the closure of the 20-year-old business owned by the girl’s father. Four years later, a judge ruled that the girl could not sue for “public disclosure of private facts” because the MySpace post was not private.

I ask you: did the judge rule ‘properly’, that is, per our understandings of privacy was this young woman’s privacy violated/compromised/etc. when her writings were repurposed and published in a local paper? Should this republication merely be treated as a copyright issue, not for strategic reasons but simply because there is no privacy issue being raised?