Let the Plain Dealer die.
Submitted by modernesquire on Tue, 06/30/2009 - 12:02pm.
Here's how you don't save any industry. You don't take your near monopoly on access to the public for dispensing information by having a Senator's wife and award-winning columnist write a column advocating that federal legislation be passed to give your publishing company leverage to force local television stations and blogs to enter into contracts to pay you to link to their content or else face endless litigation on weak property claims.
And yet, that's apparently exactly what the Plain Dealer has undertaken in trying to save its dying business model (when it should be moving heaven and earth adopting a financially and economically sound internet-based model.)
Tim Russo over at both BloggerInterrupted and his new community home at Blackheart Cleveland has been following this closely.
Essentially, what happened is that a lawyer from a major law firm who represents the Plain Dealer teamed up with his economist brother to draft a memo suggesting a change in federal copyright law that would essentially give newspapers 24-hours of exclusive use to their materials before other "news aggregators" like television and blogs could use their information. Of course, if you were willing to enter into a contract with the newspaper to pay them to have the right to cite their stories beforehand, you could. Otherwise, under the proposed copyright law, the newspapers could have legal grounds to threaten blogs to pay up or else.
It's very similar to the short-sighted legal tactics taken by the recording industry to protect their revenues lost from websites like Napster. It's evidence of the death throes of an industry unable to adapt to a new IT Age. Except that the recording industry at least had much stronger legal grounds.
I. The legal precedent the entire memo is based on doesn't apply.
The entire proposal is based on the quasi-property law issues decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in International News Service v. Associated Press (1918), 248 U.S. 215. As Tim correctly notes, the INS case is of questionable precedential value as subsequent Congressional action has overturned its holding. Furthermore, in creating the fair use doctrine, Congress recognized a legal distinction between merely presenting another news agency's report as your own (which is what INS was doing to the AP's reports) and commercially selling them to your vendors and citing to reports in another publication, by name, and discussing what they reported (what blogs and local TV stations often do.)
What this memo advocates is the oblivation of this legal distinction.
As AmberCat points out over at Ohio Daily Blog, the argument for how this even saves the Plain Dealer is puzzling. The paper claims its online activities are a money loser, but yet they apparently expect bloggers are flush with cash to pay enough to make the Plain Dealer financially solvent. Believe me, it's not possible.
II. The memo's entire premise is that newspapers are factually distinct from "news aggregators"
HAHAHA! Seriously, take any recent issue of the Plain Dealer. Mark out any advertising or story which indicates that it was the result of a wire service like AP (this includes the weather report and the stock market indexes). Okay, now anything without a byline to it because it likely has no byline because its a story they're running because a private party sent them a press release with all the information. What's left is the news that was not likely information the publisher "aggregated" from elsewhere. Want to save money Plain Dealer? Kill your AP and other wire services contract. Look at the amount of paper you'll save from expensive printing alone. Will that hurt your circulation? No, because people have been getting that information from other sources for years. Focus on local interest stories in a thinner paper. You'll be amazed how much interest in your paper there will be once you start reporting on the local stories you've passed on in the past because you couldn't find the space to compete with your everyday standard wire service content. Want to save even more money? Scrap the entire printing press altogether and go entirely online. There goes all your overhead costs for printing and distribution... You'll even be able to make money renting out the space you no longer need as a result of killing your print edition.
III. It's completely unworkable.
Imagine the litigation there would have been on 9/11 by the newspapers to try to keep that story within it's precious little 24-hour window. America is attacked! Learn more tomorrow! Seriously?
And the idea that the Plain Dealer is losing money from bloggers is silly. They'll losing money because they are once-a-day publication in an instant update information environment. They are the horse-drawn buggy makers competing against the Model T. The monk scribes against the Gutenberg press. You get the idea.
An unjust enrichment claim against bloggers would fail simply because there's no evidence we've been "enriched" by cited your content and driving people to YOUR site. Your online advertising rates surely are somewhat based on your average daily unique visitors or page hits, something related to the volume of your site's traffic. I guarantee your current web ad rates are based on traffic generated by bloggers and local television stories mentioning the Plain Dealer. Every time we write and link to one of your stories, you're getting free advertising for your site. Based on my own experience with bloggers citing my stories, I have seen how much traffic that can generate for my own publications. So, if anyone has an unjust enrichment claim, it's US!
IV. Dumb idea presented in a dumb way.
Nothing says abuse of corporate power over the flow of information like having an employee, who just happens to be the wife of a sitting U.S. Senator, advocate the "great idea" for federal legislation her employer's lawyer cooked up to save the business.
It's so "Citizen Kane." Why Connie Schultz wrote a column despite such an obvious conflict of interest is beyond me. The only thing more puzzling is how anyone at the Plain Dealer thought this was a great idea to build public support for their self-serving legislation proposal. If anything it awoke a sleeping giant of criticism on an industry desparate for sympathy and help.
Google is not your enemy, Plain Dealer, nor am I. If anything, we direct traffic for your site, not away from it.
Stop wasting time and money on lobbying Congress to reverse progress in intellectual property law in the hopes it might save your dying industry because this proposal will not work or save you. Adapt or die.
Your Analogy Is Flawed
Submitted by David Potts on Tue, 06/30/2009 - 6:25pm.
Come on Bill, at best this is buying a donut and breaking a piece of for a friend (who may in fact decide to buy a whole one).
I keep an eye on BSB's traffic, and I know we send a good portion of it out to these newspapers with our links. If anything, we create more traffic for newspapers by exposing their stories to new audiences.
And if you really wanted to get picky, do you know how many times BSB has broken news only to have a major newspaper rip off the story without even so much as a link? Portraying our work of as their own? It happens far more than you'd think.
I like BSB
Submitted by Dion on Wed, 07/01/2009 - 6:33pm.
David is correct.
I have heard national media outlets reporting BSB "news" and I can't help but think that they find some of their news on blogs. It is one of the many reasons I enjoy BSB.
I was employed with a large newspaper for several years and one thing that has to be accounted for in this discussion is the "Pursuit of the Pulitzer" that can drive reporters (and sometimes photographers) insane. I have personally witnessed reporters sell out, friends, family, advertisers, community leaders, elected officials, and even other newspaper employees, in pursuit of a story. It seems to defy all rationale.
I have seen, a "journalist" outright lie when stating they had a "Pulitzer" when they were only in the employ of a newspaper that received the award for particular coverage of a story. It drives some of them absolutely insane.
I have seen reporters ruin their careers, the newspaper and their community for their story, citing "ethics" and "integrity" while being completely blind to the fact that they are only motivated by recognition.
Blogs are still not completely in the main stream and some reporters seem to use them as generators for news "tips." This laziness plays a part of the newspapers demise. And reporters don't seem care to cite their source as long as they get the credit. Many bloggers write about topics that interest them and are not singularly dedicated to principles of journalism. It seems they can be more dedicated to their subject, asking harder questions, doing better research and more willing to take risks when writing.
Looking for "news" in a blog is a lazy. If more newspaper reporters were more willing to draw more and better conclusions and make more connections while telling stories in a broader meaning of what stories mean to readers, newspapers would not be in such bad shape. Bloggers have an advantage of unlimited page space to tell a story, but are equal in the need to capture a readers interest and convey a relevant message.
Newspapers are doomed as long as bloggers are more dedicated, have better insight, have little to no editorial controls and pursue stories over recognition and awards. In my opinion, newspapers are not getting thier asses handed to them because of a bad economy or poor advertising revenue, they are losing to better media becasue of layers of editorial buracracy, poor reporting and general apathy, while waiting for stories to fall into their laps.
Newspapers don't make news, they report it
Submitted by modernesquire on Wed, 07/01/2009 - 9:43am.
That's the fundamental flaw in your analogy. The NY Times doesn't own a bill signing ceremony with President Obama. They don't make donuts, they report on the existence of the donut.
Copyright law does mean something. I cannot pass off Plain Dealer's reporting as my own. But the tenative property interest the media outlet has in their exclusives is not such that Congress believes prevents me from telling others "Hey, today's Plain Dealer says there's this new thing called a donut."
The whole point of my post is that I'm not touching their stuff, I'm advertising it. Why if their ad revenues are based on volumes that in part the result of my own uncompensated marketing of their product should I then also be required to pay them money??
Even back during the INS/AP case was a recognition that the AP's intellectual property interest in their reporting of news was short-lived. That's before the advent of television, radio, 24-hour cable news, and the Internet.
Newspapers are not the backbone of society, a free and independent media is. The newspaper is either going to have to evolve or go the way of the town crier.
Copyright stands for something, but it doesn't stand for the ludicrious proposition being hawked by the PD... that's why a legislative enactment would be necessary... an enactment that would reverse the fair use doctrine and force the flow of information into an antiquated halt.
All to save an industry that is unwilling or unable to evolve with the changing times.
There was a time before the printed newspaper. They'll be a time without it, too.
Well, first of all, Modern,
Submitted by AmberCat on Tue, 06/30/2009 - 8:51pm.
thanks a lot for outing my identity! Didn't you know I went underground as Ambercat because of an wildly inappropriate attack on me by a certain nasty bitch who worked for Sherrod Brown back in 2006? I didn't feel safe posting under my own name anymore. Actually, I think that's all in the distant past though, and I hope this unprofessional, vindictive person no longer works for Brown.
That said, the entire premise of Marburger's proposal was baffling to me, even though I am not, like you, a lawyer. I looked at that 1918 case too, and as you said, that was more a matter of simply swiping stories. The Plain Dealer seems to be proposing two equally untenable things here: embargoing possible discussion of information printed in their paper for 24 hours (they can already sue us if we simply reprint their stories without linking to the original source) and charging blogs for providing the PD with page hits and and revenue which is jaw-droppingly laughable.
I too am reminded of the record industry, who wasted more than a decade trying to hold back progress — focusing on going after file-sharing sites and suing customers rather than working to develop a viable model for selling music digitally themselves. The reason that that business is on the verge of disappearing is because its response to new developements has always been "Ban it", not "How can we use it?" And you can't hold back technology. They wanted a tax on cassettes; they wanted to bar recordable CDs. Futile. They were so out of the loop that the major labels couldn't figure out for a decade how to put up a useful website, while local bands were doing it by the thousands.
I agree that a strong, tight focus on local news would have been a great avenue to take but I wonder if it is too late. The paper has completely gutted arts and music coverage (ooh, wow, they're going to return two whole pages in Sunday's paper — gosharoonies!), and its coverage of local politics is so biased and corrupt, it's impossible to take seriously. I would love to see a lot more actual pro-and-con reportage on controversial local issues, rather than cheerleading, advocacy and witch hunts. I wish the paper saw its mission as to inform us rather than to promote certain projects, people and interests — even if some of them seem kind of innocuous, like being a cheerleader for local sports teams.
The (mis)use of Connie Schultz to be their mouthpiece on this shoddy proposal just saddens me. This is probably the single worst column she has ever written, and as I said over at Ohio Daily Blog, I wish someone had strongly advised her against it.
Amber, I'm sorry, but
Submitted by modernesquire on Wed, 07/01/2009 - 9:57am.
I thought you had already outed yourself in the comments here awhile ago. And, no, I didn't know that.
I love a person who actually writes the word "gosharoonies". But you're right. The Plain Dealer has been finally doing some investigative reporting of the corruption and abusive practices of the elected county Democrats there. I saw it as an encouraging sign that the paper realized its role and mission again. And then I read this stupid memo.
I seriously think Connie just didn't realize the negative implications of her writing an advocacy piece of this. I'm not saying she's NOT a highly intelligent writer, but I think she honestly didn't see how having her, in particular, write this column would rub people the wrong way because she's married to Sherrod.
It's tough for her to be a columnist and avoid writing about something that implicates her husband's work, but this was one in which SOMEBODY should have realized would not pass the smell test.
I told Tim that the Connie thing is more a distraction to the real issue of the Plain Dealer's attempt to get federal legislation to essentially stop blogging.
If the Plain Dealer doesn't want me as a blogger to link to its site and promote its content here without paying them money, I guess I should consider whether I should boycott their website. I don't want to promote somebody's content if they don't want me to.
Newspapers can stop Google anytime
Submitted by jump23 on Wed, 07/01/2009 - 9:52am.
I know that this solution is somewhat technical, but it's so easy that I'm not sure why this gets overlooked so much.
Any of the newspapers actually wanted to stop Google from indexing their stories, it's really simple. They open their robots.txt file and put in "User-agent: * Disallow: /". By doing that, Google's software will not find their stories. Problem solved.
Of course, they want to have it both ways - they want the traffic generated by Google but not the actual searching of their content.
This post puts it into perspective quite well: http://daggle.com/googles-love-for-newspapers-how-little-they-appreciate-it-443
I find it remarkable how deep-in-the-sand the newspapers have their heads, among other places.
R.I.P. Newspapers
Submitted by O-H...I-O on Wed, 07/01/2009 - 11:04am.
The INS opinion was more specifically tailored to say: International News can not sit back and let the AP send their reporter on-site, have that AP reporter send their article over the wire, and then steal that AP reporter's work and pass it on as your own. The opinion merely stated that news collection agencies have property over their work v. another new collection agency; not that they have property rights over the news itself against the public. In short, it is incredibly weak precedent for what Ms. Schultz proposes and ignores the fact that this is 2009, not 1909. But really, that's not the issue. The newspapers will die (or change drastically - say be published twice a week) because of simple evolution.
First, they cannot survive the information age. Take the Miracle on the Hudson, for example. About three hours after the plane had landed on the water, there was a Wikipedia entry with over 40 citations detailing the event. I could also go on the Twitter page of one of the passengers and see a picture. There was no reason for me to buy a NY Times the following morning to learn anything new. Especially considering that NYT would not update if a new development occurred at 1:00 pm the following day. Now, if this were 1913 and I wanted to be informed about every breaking development in the sinking of the Titanic, I would run to get a copy of the paper at the crack of dawn every morning. Progress, however, has occurred, and evolution is eating up newspapers.
Second, the biggest problem with newspapers is not blogs -- it's Craigslist. Their revenue is lost because no one needs to use the classifieds, a typical sure-fire moneymaker. I'm currently looking for an apartment, and I sure as hell am not pouring over the classified section every morning. I check Craigslist and I check listings on Realty web-sites.
Connie Schultz is a talented writer and she can continue to be a valued writer in the post-Newspaper days. But those days are coming and writing ridiculous proposals that spit in the face of reality do not help.
First, they cannot survive the information age. Take the Miracle on the Hudson, for example. About three hours after the plane had landed on the water, there was a Wikipedia entry with over 40 citations detailing the event. I could also go on the Twitter page of one of the passengers and see a picture. There was no reason for me to buy a NY Times the following morning to learn anything new. Especially considering that NYT would not update if a new development occurred at 1:00 pm the following day. Now, if this were 1913 and I wanted to be informed about every breaking development in the sinking of the Titanic, I would run to get a copy of the paper at the crack of dawn every morning. Progress, however, has occurred, and evolution is eating up newspapers.
Second, the biggest problem with newspapers is not blogs -- it's Craigslist. Their revenue is lost because no one needs to use the classifieds, a typical sure-fire moneymaker. I'm currently looking for an apartment, and I sure as hell am not pouring over the classified section every morning. I check Craigslist and I check listings on Realty web-sites.
Connie Schultz is a talented writer and she can continue to be a valued writer in the post-Newspaper days. But those days are coming and writing ridiculous proposals that spit in the face of reality do not help.
I Gotta Disagree Here. Copyright Law Has To Mean Something