The Hot Blog: Baby, The Sky Must Fall

April 08, 2009

Baby, The Sky Must Fall

I wish the discussions of the future could be had without the hysteria.

Jeff Jarvis went all drama queen after the New York Times did a story about the AP trying to find a legal way to regain control of their content.

Thing is, this IS the discussion of the future. And the notion of AP or anyone else expecting to get paid by people who link to their content is as dead stupid As Jeff Jarvis screaming about the old white men of Traditional Media. It is not a one or the other conversation and surely, nothing like that can ever be a solution.

There are two kinds of aggregators in the game... those who just link and might comment and those who steal significant chunks of content, making a click-thru an unlikely choice for a large portion of their readership.

I would say that, as Jarvis notes, the first group is responsible for the survival of the AP and pretty much all the news organizations that will survive and thrive in the web era. Drudge, for instance, is the King of the Aggregators and can deliver page views in the hundreds of thousands for many of the stories to which he links. And, in fact, the creation of Breitbart.com to funnel wire service links to a controlled site that can produce more revenue from those links was not only very smart, but, as I assume Breitbart pays AP for their content, it makes sense for them as well.

The other side of it is sites that use other people's content to not only fill the giant holes in the coverage they claim to offer, but take large chunks of content, stuck on branded and (theoretically) ad-sold pages, sometimes multiple internal pages, knowing full well that only a small percentage of readers go past the first few graphs anymore online. So they grab with a heavy headline, create a another page view or two by copying the content (and another when people click back to the homepage where they found the initial link), and more often than not, never send eyeballs to the organization paying for the wire service in the first place.

I consider this stealing... even if Jeff Jarvis thinks its old thinking. Linking = good. Reprinting content for free with no consideration = bad. Just like all piracy.

This doesn't make the failure of Old Media to convert to New Media any less real. But it is a different argument.

There is another category of what AP is chasing (along with other content creators), which is control of Google placement. And that is a more complex issue. If AP and/or Reuters and/or TribCo and/or NYT and/or WashPo, etc, have easy and clear access to their stories with one site as the source, do they deserve to be the link people use and Google puts on top? It is my philosophy that, yes, they do. We have always tried to work our way back to the source when linking at MCN. For years, the wire services have not had home pages and we have chosen between hundreds of wire service subscribing websites for links. Drudge used to link most AP stories through the Washington Post web pages until Breitbart.com. At MCN, we spread it around. But if AP wants the link to their story and I can find it and it is the complete story, hell yeah, happy to offer readers the source.

The lesson of a closed web has already been learned. It doesn't work. If you close your content off, someone else will run a similar story and you will get fewer and fewer links. Almost nothing, in this age, is actually exclusive in any way for more than a few minutes. There are stories that don't actually get re-reported, but just re-printed in some form or the other. I have no use for that. But think about what happens on most industry stories when they break. There are, usually, at least four or five outlets that have already done some reporting on the story. That is the speed nightmare... everyone is on it... who is going to break it, even if it isn't really news yet.

Even the legendary NYT wrote a story just a day or two ago in which they ascribed - with zero way of knowing the truth - a "most people found out" status twice, not based on any objective facts, but clearly on the personal experience of the authors of the story... a detail that used to be (and still should be) irrelevant in journalism.

Anyway...

Jarvis sounds like a buffoon when he bloviates: "You lost an entire generation. You lost the future of news."

Both sides of the argument need to start realizing… nothing, but printed content being sold daily in the quantity of hundreds of thousands of full-price-paying customers loaded with full-price-paying ad buyers, is lost forever… nothing is over… standards will change… some things will be better… some things will be worse…

Everything in life is not a fucking trend story. Please step away from the hysteria.

ADD, 3:10p - I forgot to mention... the once irreplaceable Michael Wolff has become another self-serving web idiot. What is it about this medium that drives reasonable people to start acting like gunslinging cowboys, making mature sites like AICN looking like level-headed businesspeople?

Does Wolff realize - or care - that he is, on what seems to be a legal standard that will hold up against him if ever challenged, boldly saying that he not only thinks that stealing content is ok, but that it is, somehow, the moral high ground?

He wrote: "If newspapers follow the Journal model and wall off their content with subscription fees, we’ll do what we do now with the WSJ site. We'll buy a subscription and then we'll summarize whatever they’re charging for, bringing their way-too-long and gassy prose down to Internet size—so you can, in other words, read less, and know more—and we'll give it to you for free."

In other words, if someone won't give away their work to us to do with what we like, we will steal it and reconfigure it as we like, and give it to you for free.

Huh?

Of the Wolverine leak, his insight includes this claim against the elder leaders of News Corp: "They continue to think of this as exceptional behavior, while everybody else knows it’s trivial stuff."

Stealing is trivial. Great.

You know, it may be unavoidable. They may need to change the model drastically. But trivial it is not.

He continues with his profound self-awareness that the New York Times is dead and it doesn't really matter because he can just go on with so much other news reporting out there. And while I don't buy into the "the web is evil... Traditional Media is the only way to get news," the idea that the best of reporting means nothing anymore - not this week, but forever more - is just idiotic and short-sighted.

But again... a really smart guy. What is with all the saber rattling by men with dulled tools?

I would suggest that, ironically, it is experience that makes these guys so loud... and that experience has made formerly hysterical sites much more moderate... and accurate... about where we are.

As I find myself repeating... when the value of a segment of an industry drops from 60% of revenues to 40%, it is a massive change... and in micro-world, it a earth-shaking... but when we start talking about the 50% drop in significance to that 40% and forget that 40% is still a whole lot... it's very real... and it is enough to keep 2/3 of the careers at risk going... that is when we have lost all perspective because it is all about us and never about what's real.

Posted by dpoland at April 8, 2009 02:34 PM

Comments

First off, don't sweat the copyright/link argument. The law firm Jones-Day sued a real estate website for linking to its attorney pages, and lost. J-D is the world's biggest law firm and they couldn't make the infringement argument stick. The most they got was a disclaimer and non-hotlinks.

Re: Huffpo. They infringe massively, all the time, so this seems to be the main precursor for the newly announced "investigative journalism" branch...that and a way to dig up dirt on those deemed the enemy since it's a glorified tabloid.

Re: Google, they will fight any attempt to dictate search placement. That's the bread-n-butter and have no reason to give. What I can see happening is a separate J-Google that traces stories by timestamp. I wouldn't be surprised if Google bought Lexis-Nexis for this very reason.

As for Wolff, I get his argument but it's not going to stand. Too much sea-change going on for such an obvious tactic to work.

Posted by: Martin S at April 8, 2009 05:23 PM

"The WSJ and the New York Times and every other newspaper can fold and we here at Newser will still be sorting through vast quantities of news, opinion, and analysis."

Much more the second and third than the first, I'd imagine.

Posted by: Hallick at April 8, 2009 06:25 PM

Drudge, for instance, is the King of the Aggregators ...

Right-wing snitch ... relies on hearsay ... pays sources for stories (unethical in the U.S.) ... propped up by the Liberal Media whose bigshots have right-wing sympathies.

Noot to mention that he's barely in the closet.

Posted by: Chucky in Jersey at April 8, 2009 07:09 PM

...and?

Posted by: jeffmcm at April 8, 2009 07:14 PM

Yeah, it's really too bad Drudge does all that stuff. I'm sure he'd be doing a lot better if he weren't.

Posted by: Blackcloud at April 8, 2009 08:40 PM

The first segment on Charlie Rose last night was about this, with Huffy and the guy from AP. She kept stressing the "linked economy", which made sense in the beginning but started to falter when the AP guy says everything they're looking to implement is B2B stuff and not at the consumer.

Posted by: Martin S at April 9, 2009 06:28 AM

Tell that in Florida and the response you'll get is WTF?

Posted by: Chucky in Jersey at April 9, 2009 10:05 AM

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April 08, 2009

Baby, The Sky Must Fall

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