Is there any way to avoid this?

I am helping out a friend who writes a daily column which gets sent to 40,000 opted in email subscribers daily. She has an agreement with Creators.com which syndicates the column 1 week in advance to various newspapers (which gets put out both in print and online).

Creators themselves posts the last 7 days of each column. The actual email itself is 7 days dated, meaning if Creators posts and syndicates it on Monday, the email doesn't go out until the following Monday. However, she retains all electronic rights (though we can't stop them from posting it online as part of the agreement.)

Here's my qualm. I have created her a blog where I will be posting each column the same day as it goes out in email. (The domain is 9 years old and is PR4 naturally, it was previously just used as a landing page to sign up). I am going to start delaying the email an extra 7 days so the posts won't be up on Creators and her new blog at the same time, but the posts will have already syndicated to a few newspapers online by the time we post them on her site.

The majority of these sites DO link back to her blog since it used to be her landing page for signups (though not all).

Obviously I will be linking to each post in the email column so we will get a considerable amount of traffic from that. However I am concerned since these posts will have already been online in other places first (on authority websites) Google will see them as duplicate content on our blog and therefore they will see little to no organic traffic.

Are these worries warranted? Is there anything I can do to make it less of an impact in regards to organic traffic?

Thanks for reading and helping.

Edit: Sorry, this should have gone in SEO/Adsense - wasn't really sure what I was going to write at the time until I wrote it... Paul or anyone please feel free to move it.