How To Save The Newspapers, Vol. XII: Outlaw Linking
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I show up 5 minutes late to a lunch/forum about the future of news here in Chicago featuring Carl Bernstein plus the editors of the Sun-Times, Tribune and other local publications. I find a seat at a table of youngsters and find out they're all undergrads at Northwestern's journalism program, where I earned an MSJ.
I introduce myself, tell them I run a news aggregator for local stuff. One turns to me.
"I hate what you do. You're ruining the industry."
"Wha?"
Intrigued, I try to figure out what she means through a series of increasingly specific questions about what she doesn't like until finally I ask the big one:
"Do you think it's wrong for a web site to link to another web site?"
"Yes. Unless they've paid the site they're linking to for the right to do so."
That explained everything. I'm not unsympathetic to her POV. She wants to be a reporter, and those jobs are increasingly hard to come by. She blames "the blogs" for this. I explained that there are many more opportunities out there for her to report and inform the public that didn't involve working for a newspaper. She wasn't interested. It always amazes me how reporters can be so clever and entrepreneurial in their reporting while being so darn conservative and narrow-minded in how they manage their careers.
... And still have enough resources (cash) to produce new, valuable information, as opposed to being a gossip outlet or just blogging about things you read elsewhere online?
If there are "many more opportunities" how come they're not obvious? Are there really many of them? Can you name a single operating "newspaper replacement"?
Assuming every nytimes.com in the world closes its doors tomorrow. What are you going to aggregate?
You could go report for a wire service covering a state capitol.
You could go report for one of the many B2B web sites and publications popping up to serve industries and audiences that actually have money to spend.
You could report for one of the many e-mail newsletter businesses that I know are thriving and growing.
You could cover real estate news for the blog of a realtor.
You could cover food news for the blog of a coalition of restaurants.
But if the only job that will make you happy is covering "important stuff" at a newspaper supported by advertising and classifieds that aims at a general audience and maintains a stance of complete objectivity and impartiality, you're closing the door on many opportunities that would employ the same skillset.
The reason these opportunities are not obvious is because people keep looking for something that works just like a newspaper. If it works just like a newspaper, it won't be a viable business.
If the NYTimes goes under, it'll be replaced by 100 blogs of varying quality and focus. Someone will be rewarded greatly for stepping in there and aggregating them.
Did you know there used to be dozens of newspapers in Chicago? Every immigrant group put out its own paper. Is it so crazy to think we might be returning to that model for a while?
That's the ONLY job we're discussing here. A journalist, you know. Every single "opportunity" you have listed isn't journalism, those are corporate PR gigs. Real estate news for a blog of a realtor? Seriously? And a hundred of those will be a worthy replacement for New York Times?
Blogs aren't new. Five years ago every corporate web site had a "news" section and now it's fashionable to call it a "blog". So that's what journalism school graduates should be wasting their lives writing, and I should be reading from now on? So instead of semi-independent media we'll just have a million little press-releases
Working for a "newspaper replacement" isn't limiting, it is actually quite ambitious, especially compared to the PR career you have suggested. No wonder that girl was mad at you.
And don't pose as some kind of visionary and don't call someone's ambitions "limiting". Face it: you just want someone else's content to aggregate, i.e. profit from. And you seem to care very little of what that content happens to be.
Lets repeat the exercise: how can a young and ambitious reporter find resources to do a high-quality reporting (i.e. not press releases) on toxic food in supermarkets, the war in Iraq, corruption in a state senate, etc? Which "real estate broker" will pay for that?
Also, if writing for a wire service isn't journalism, I don't know what is. The problem with it is that you don't get a byline and you have to churn out boilerplate stories at a prodigious pace.
The issue in question is you don't seem to be concerned with the media as a 4th branch of the government, you don't see the independent press as crucial component of our political system. I'm quite active politically, and what I have learned is that we, as citizens, have the only tool at our disposal which we can use to fight back against corrupt politicians and various interest groups: i.e. call for a massive media attention.
At first glance, Internet should help here big time, right? Well, wrong: Independent web campaigns just don't work: it takes a lot of time and momentum to become visible, often you need the public to intervene ASAP: sometimes it's about saving city parks, sometimes its about public outrage against converting a public interstate highway (paid for with taxpayers dollars) into a toll road controlled by an out-of-state company, sometimes its about ah fuck it, HN is clearly the wrong venue for this.
Entrepreneurial programmers simply seek "data" they can crawl and re-post with their own ads, who gives a flying fuck about 4th branches and all that boring offline stuff, right?
If you want it to be independent of the government, then you'll have to come up with some way to fund it that doesn't depend either on direct funding or the backdoor funding of making it illegal to innovate in the field.
Necessity will breed innovation.
Back in the late 90's, I was working for public broadcasting, and the mentality of management was that you needed permission to link to another website. They would get on the phone with the owners of the other website and ask. That is the sort of mentality you are dealing with. I suspect a disturbingly large fraction of the mainstream has this view.
> "Yes. Unless they've paid the site they're linking to for the right to do so."
Did you ask her if she thinks that you should pay her before telling a friend how to get to the great article that she wrote, a way that lets her monetize said article as she sees fit? If she says yes, as her if she understands the question and whether she wants readers. If she says no, you ask her if she minds if you tell 10 strangers.
A link isn't content. It's a way to get content. It doesn't affect her ability to monetize her content in any way that she feels appropriate. Newspaper folk either don't understand that or ....
If you take their headline (or even portion of their article), they might feel that you do not give enough compensation back to them. Producing a headline is also a work, and good headline carry some actual content. So you just take that content and don't pay for it. You just provide a link, which cost you almost nothing.
This was just to describe how they might think about you.
It's just like sharing links on Facebook or Twitter.
Quoting some idea from another source with attribution is a very common thing. But this practice has specific implications when applied to reported news. I saw the following practice on blogs like Huffington Post or news aggregators: they take headline and one or two paragraphs from a news article, provide a link to it, and optionally add their own content to it. Technically it is quoting with attribution, which is perfectly legal.
But as we know, the news articles are usually written in a dense form, and to produce just the headline and one paragraph is sometimes very expensive, for example when a real reporter had to go there and gather the facts.
And then, some blogger or aggregator just take it and gives back just a link - and the news websites doesn't feel that is an adequate compensation for the work needed to produce that headline and paragraph.
And, more often than not, the aggregator or blogger earned enough money to survive (since what he did is not that expensive), while the news outlet who did the reporting didn't earn enough to operate.
But of course, on the other side, it's not a fault of the blogger or aggregator that they didn't earned enough, and that's where the newspapers get it wrong. I just wanted to provide the perspective from the "other side".
Great point! This is why I'm worried about a future without NYTimes and other traditional news outlets. The most dangerous possibility is that there won't be any economic incentive left to do the original investigative reporting. But maybe we don't need any economic incentive anyway, and we'll get plenty of free news from the twitter-ers, casual bloggers, cellphone video uploaders and other common folk.
Obvious example: How deeply can an investigative reporter at NBC really probe into the affairs of General Electric, the company that owns it?
Similarly, if a bunch of local realtors got together and hired an investigative reporter to cover real estate, people would howl and moan about conflict of interest...but that person would probably dig up some great stories, just not stories about the companies funding him/her.
They may not like quoting more than they don't like linking, but they are campaigning against linking (and quoting).
They're also arguing that they should be given an exclusive on information. In a recent example, they think that folks shouldn't be allowed to post that MJ died after reading about it from a "legit" on-line source.
Nobody does that because it's horrible business practice and a easy way to isolate yourself from the rest of the web. Regardless, we certainly don't need the government to enforce a behavior that individuals could easily adopt on their own.
for all the others, learning how to link themselves to other newspapers and blogs, i.e. learning to take part in the online conversation, is absolutely crucial if they want to have a chance of surviving.
Hint: if you have to change the law to protect an industry, the industry is a dinosaur. You are not really saving it, merely delaying the inevitable at great global expense. The proper course of action lies in that eastern technique known as letting go
That essentially no papers do so illustrates the problem with such a strategy: as long as one reasonable-substitute competitor allows inlinking, bloggers/aggregators don't care, and the anti-inlinking paper has only hurt itself.
What I think they really want is to outlaw all linking unless some cartel (rather than individual targets) approves. Then they can lock out all 'parasites' (in their view) from their newsgathering value.
You can see this true agenda in opinion pieces like the following:
"Newspapers need an antitrust exemption" http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/la-oe-rutten4-200...
"Laws that could save Journalism" http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05...
Or they really have no understanding of the technology. Every so often some site complains about "deep linking" (the misnomer itself indicate their level of cluelessness). They seek out legal sanctions when some simple site coding would fix the problem faster and cheaper.