We ran into that when we started building the brand for the soon-to-launch TBD. It’s a popular acronym, as everyone knows, so securing that namespace in social media was quite challenging. Though we’ve been tweeting for nearly two months as @TBDDC, this week we finally acquired @TBD. This is how it went down.

We wanted @TBD from the start, but it was occupied by a private, dormant account with zeroes across the board – no followers, no follows and no tweets.

Obviously, the first step in this scenario is to try to contact the handle owner. From my own account, I requested to follow this user to see if they were checking their notifications. Either they weren’t checking or I was rejected, because I never heard back.

I also sent the user a couple of @ replies to see if they were even checking those. No response.

It was time to turn to Twitter.

When you want to take this next step, it’s important to note Twitter’s policies in relation to your situation.

The policies are different depending on whether or not the account is active, whether the user is actively impersonating your brand and whether or not you have a registered trademark on your name.

If someone is actively using the handle you want in accordance with the rules, there’s little Twitter can do, even if you have a trademark on the name.

From Twitter:

Where there is a clear intent to mislead others through the unauthorized use of a trademark, Twitter will suspend the account and notify the account holder.

When an account appears to be confusing users, but is not purposefully passing itself off as the brand/company/product, the account holder will be notified and given an opportunity to clear up any potential confusion, per the guidelines listed below.

Contacting the user directly is really your only hope to getting the name in this instance.

If you want to acquire the handle of an inactive account, as we did, it really helps to have a registered trademark on the name. We did not have our trademark registration info right away, but I still submitted  a ticket request to have the name released.

Once we got our trademark registration information, I filed another ticket, this time under the trademark policy. This time I filled out the required trademark info. To do this, our Twitter account had to be linked to an email address from our domain (an important thing to note if you have a business or blog without a URL yet). This was the final thing that pushed it over the top and got us @TBD.

If you don’t have a trademark registration, you may still have a chance, though note this important point in Twitter’s inactive username policy:

We are currently working to release all inactive usernames in bulk, but we do not have a set time frame for when this will take place. If a username you would like has been claimed by an account that seems inactive, you should consider selecting an available variation for your use on Twitter.

Even so, it wouldn’t hurt to submit a ticket request from your account to report the inactive name.

When and if you get a username opened up, you can easily change your Twitter handle to the new one without affecting your followers, lists or settings. You can do this from the Account tab of your account Settings.  In our case, Twitter rolled @TBDDC over to @TBD for us.

When you change your Twitter handle, you have to be vocal about the change. If you can do it before the changeover, tell your followers what’s coming. After the change, they’ll receive your tweets at the new handle, but they may not realize the difference and may send replies and DMs to your old handle. Tweet about the change and encourage retweets. It might not hurt to briefly re-secure your old handle and put up a message there about the new account.

Note: If you get a second handle for this purpose, be  good citizen and don’t name-squat. After a couple of weeks or so, if you aren’t going to use this account for something else, delete it and re-open the name.

But even if you don’t get the handle you want, you shouldn’t let it stop you from jumping into social media.   It wasn’t a deterrent for TBD – we were able to build a lot of buzz on @TBDDC before we got the new name (and we were prepared to have that name be permanent).

If you can’t get the username of your brand, think of a way to make your own version. Shorten it, add an adjective or adverb, tack on a location or do something entirely out-of-the-box. It really isn’t all in a name. It all depends on how you use the medium and how well you can promote it elsewhere.

The same people we’ve had to file FOIA requests about for decades want to help us “save” our industry. Isn’t that nice of them? It isn’t like they don’t have other things to worry about.

Ideas on the table include waiving antitrust statutes to allow newspapers to all charge for online content at once, taxing iPads and other e-readers, establishing a government fund to pay young journalists to do…something and allowing newspapers to charge aggregators for linking to their content.

If these are the solutions proposed, it’s pretty easy to see what the problem REALLY is. Journalism isn’t what they’re trying to save here – it’s newspapers. And not just any newspapers – the government is trying to prop up a defiantly anti-evolutionary business model supported by big corporations who can actually afford to save themselves if they’d be willing to make a little less profit.

These solutions would do far more harm than good for journalism. They seek to punish those innovative individuals and news organizations that are trying – and sometimes failing – to do business a new way in order to survive. But at least they’re trying.

Allowing big, established publications to break all the rules would push the online startups and hardworking bloggers out of business – and for what? To make sure the Gannetts of the world are still able to pay out big dividends to shareholders? To create throwaway jobs for young journalists who can and should be paid by the news organizations that currently make money off their free work?

More importantly, this kind of move seeks to take choice away from the American people. Newspaper readership isn’t down because the Internet “steals” their product – it’s because readers have chosen to get news elsewhere. News consumers want to read news online, on Twitter, on mobile devices and iPads. Some would just rather hear about what’s going on from a favorite blogger or a friend on Facebook than a 600-word news article. Forcing people to pay for news from newspapers doesn’t make information more accessible – and THAT should be the goal of any government intervention.

Journalism is doing fine – it’s only old media that needs a lifeline. The government can study all they want – and, by all means, they can go ahead and start offering bribes – er, subsidies and new statutes – to aid news organizations. But anyone who takes this money has no business calling themselves journalists anymore. “Ministers of Information” may be more appropriate.

Geanne Rosenberg, writing for the Nieman Lab, jumps into the Federal Shield conversation, asserting that student journalists should also get the protections of their professional counterparts. If you read this blog, you know I’m a big proponent for citizen journalists, bloggers and other “non-professionals” to get this protection, so kudos to her for recognizing the rights of students as well.

The Nieman Lab has an overview of a longer paper from Marion Fremont-Smith at Harvard law about the non-profit model for funding news. There are a lot of questions out there as to whether or not tax law might need to be changed to allow for a current for-profit news org to become non-profit. Fremont-Smith’s paper argues there should be no new guidelines or legislation needed to make this happen.

A very interesting case is going on right now where TV personality Glenn Beck is essentially trying to use domain name laws to out an online critic (and it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere). While it goes against the reason behind the law, it certainly is a creative way to circumvent other media law to take down those who oppose your point of view.

Who’s charging for content – or not

For those keeping score….

• Talking Points Memo: Exploring a membership model, but not an all-encompassing pay wall.
• Newsday – Creating a subscribers-only pay wall – and Steve Outing thinks they’re nuts & suggests a micropayment model.
• Dallas Morning News – DMN is betting on readers being willing to pay more to have a better newspaper – not online yet, but in print.
• Speaking of “premium content” that is “worth paying for”, Outing started a great discussion about what content readers might be willing to buy.
• And now for something completely different. Check out the new site for the non-profit Texas Tribune if you haven’t already. It’s lovely – simple, clean, easy-to-read. And everyone’s really hopeful this is a news experiment that will succeed.

Crazy ideas worth hearing

Robert Niles has a provocative idea – evaluate whether or not your site really needs to be in Google News, Crazy? Maybe, but check it out. There’s some potentially mind-blowing food for thought about why news sites and blogs may not want to be involved with Google News – and it isn’t about that silly  “freeloading” nonsense. He argues that search engine page views aren’t “quality” views and they might be leading to more spam.

Or, if you really hate Google and you’re Rupert Murdoch, you’ll insist the search engine is stealing your stuff against your will. Google finally had enough of the News Corp. owner, saying that if he really doesn’t want Google indexing his sites, he can be removed. Of course, this blogger thinks Murdoch knew that already.

Newspaper-sponsored blog networks! Catch the wave! While it certainly isn’t the first such blog network (ahem), the Guardian is hiring bloggers to cover local news.

And seriously, it’s been said before and said again, this time by Paid Content: When is someone going to buy Breaking News Online ? They’re the best there is at breaking news online – and yet, they are still independent.

And a word or two about the Twitter

Social Media Today has a great bit of coverage about Twitter lately i just had to share.

For one, there’s a much-needed reality check on Twitter’s trending topics from the folks at Social Media Today, more importantly, do those topics really reflect what people are actually talking about or what is really going on in the world?

They also take a refreshing look at Twitter lists from the “quality over quantity” perspective. In other words, it isn’t a popularity contest to get listed a lot, especially wen there are a lot of lists.

And get ready to take down your “English only” Twitter search filter. Soon enough, we’ll be able to translate tweets with no problem.

How the Old, the Young and Everyone in Between Uses Social Networks – eMarketer – Great stats on who’s using social media tools by age group. We’ve seen these before, but the numbers seem to change so fast…

The reason it’s suddenly a big deal is that a writer at the Washington Post, Ian Shapira, finally decided to throw a (well-written) snit about Gawker blogging about one of their pieces. Shapira charges that Gawker infringed on the copyright of his work because so much of their post was derived from his story.

Gawker’s post quoted heavily from the source’s quotes in the Post story  in fact, slightly more than half of their very short post was from the WaPo story. The Nieman Journalism Lab took a look at what was used and asked it’s readers if they thought Gawker violated Fair Use or fell well within its guidelines.  The comments are well worth a full read, as they really put the heart of the debate right out there:

1. The Gawker post clearly qualifies as Fair Use. Commenter Justin reminds us that the code states that content use “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.” Comment and criticism – what else is Gawker if not that?

2. Despite Shapira’s claims to the contrary, the Post did get credit. Sure, Gawker could have said it came from the post before the end – but they gave them something far more valuable. They linked to the original story – several times in fact. As commenter (and excellent young blogger) Cody Brown says, in the online world, that’s the best credit you can get.

3. Was the Post damaged by it? Hardly. Shapira noted that Gawker was the #2 referrer on the web to his story and likely contributed quite a few new readers to an otherwise mundane story that may not have had a lot of legs online otherwise.

4. Who owns the quotes from the source anyway? If Gawker should cut the post a check for quoting their piece and selling ads around it (which the WaPo writer suggests in jest), what does the Post owe their original source for selling ads around her quotes? (And furthermore, does reporting count as aggregation, too?)

5. Would the Post be complaining if it wasn’t Gawker? That’s debatable. As the commenter notes (and I say all of the time) other newspapers, broadcast and wire services do this quite a bit too – why isn’t there any more outrage about that?

I really question why Shapira’s editor even let him write that follow-up charging that Gawker stole from his work. Does Shapira really have a background that makes him knowledgeable enough about these sticky issues of fair use and media law that he can make claims that even experienced media lawyers aren’t altogether clear on? Also, how many of the Post’s online readers even care about this issue? You know who cares to hear about how much work Shapira put into this everyday story only to have it “ripped off” by big, bad blogs? Journalists. That’s about it.

How much of this whole debate – not just the WaPo v. Gawker, but the whole blogs/aggregators vs. old media – is based in old-fashioned jealousy? Chris Krewson, editor of the Philadelphia Enquirer, said this to me on Twitter: “Aren’t we at least a little annoyed that Gawker and the aggies are faring well, ad-wise?”

Yes, I think we are. Gawker’s media sales have shot up this year. Ad revenues are up 45% year-over-year for the first six months of 2009 – and their production costs fall way below that of a newspaper. But isn’t that just good competition?

Maybe we just need to be better.

Here are more related posts about the whole Gawker debate you may find interesting:

• Journalism’s Problem Isn’t Gawker. It’s Advertising. – The Atlantic Politics Channel – Atlantic’s followup analysis to the Nieman Lab post. Gawker isn’t the issue here, they insist, online advertising is the real issue – so maybe all of these people wringing their hands about Gawker and the like should focus on the task at hand. (amen)
• Gawker’s Link Etiquette (or Lack Thereof) : CJR – An interesting look at Gawker’s linking habits. As the CJR notes, what they do falls within existing Fair Use guidelines and they DO link to the original piece – just way, way down in the story. I don’t agree with the practice, but I also don’t think we need a law that makes Gawker link to the original higher in the story.

Marburger tells and retells the story of the Little Red Hen in all of his appearances. Have you read it yet?

Remember the Little Red Hen? She’s the one in the folk tale who asks the other barnyard animals if they will help her cut the wheat, grind it into flour and bake the bread. They refuse. But when the warm bread emerges from the oven, they are eager to help the hen eat it.

Now let’s suppose the story continues, with the Little Red Hen opening a roadside stand to sell her bread. Instead of merely eating it themselves, the cow, the pig and the dog each take some of her loaves and open competing roadside stands. Vying for sales, they undercut her price and each others’. Because the Little Red Hen bore all the costs to produce the bread, and the other animals bore none, she can’t afford to match their prices, and they drive her out of business.

Newspaper sites are supposed to be the hen. He likens aggregator sites like Newser.com to the other animals.

To anyone that isn’t in the news business, this sounds pretty acceptable. After all, isn’t the point of competition in a free market supposed to mean that you try to undersell your competition by having a lower overhead? It’s called good business. Too bad for the Little Red Hen – maybe she should become a manufacturer or wholesaler instead of a shop owner.

To whose that aren’t familiar, Newser.com is a worldwide wholesaler of other people’s news, in a sense. They summarize stories from many news sources in a paragraph or so and link back to the original story. As you can see here, they state on each summary where the source is and link to it. Sure, it could stand to be more prominent, but it’s better than what TV does every day. (It should also be pointed out that site looks dreadful and isn’t very user-friendly)

Marburger claims that sites like Newser are “free riding” on newspapers and it should be illegal. From the poll on the editorial, which asks “Should websites be allowed to use excerpts from daily news sites?” the populace doesn’t agree (it’s 68% against the Marburger plan, 32% for it as I write).

The basis for the Marburger argument is that sites like Newser are driving down online advertising rates because they aggregate content and surround it with low-priced ads. He calls them “competitors”. He says they are “direct substitutes for newspapers”.

First of all, if your story can be summarized in a paragraph and that’s honestly enough for a casual reader to know about it – it probably isn’t worth fighting about. Secondly, Newser isn’t a competitor with the newspaper websites it links to. A quick look at Alexa shows how their traffic compares to the likes of the two Times, Tribune and Guardian:

Newser ranks way, way below the big news sites in terms of page views.

While I agree that advertising is the issue – it isn’t the fault of aggregators. It’s that the entire business model for online advertising is broken. As Bill Grueskin said last month in an excellent paidContent analysis, “Aggregators are more a distraction from the real crisis than the cause of it” because even if they are siphoning off users (of course, they also refer users), it isn’t really hurting the bottom line.

Online ad rates have been artificially low for years. We’re partly to blame – after all, most newspaper have been online since the 90s and we never charged for online ads what they are worth. Furthermore, the online audience doesn’t like and doesn’t see value in online ads. They block them, they don’t click on them, they HATE them.

CPMs are so low that thousands upon thousands of views to our site today won’t even buy lunch for our newsroom, let alone sustain the industry. Grueskin says what a lot of us in online news have been whispering for years – why are we measuring our worth in page views anyway? We should be using metrics like page views per user or time on site rather than by the  number of people visiting the site, “many of whom may not assign any value to the journalists who generated the content”.

In other words, better understand the audience, seek out what it wants, determine what we can provide – possibly in terms of a premium service – and find a way to monetize that outside of online ads. That’s something an operation like Newser could never do and it actually provides a sustainable plan for future growth. Crazy, I know.

So why do we have to keep giving face time to David Marburger and his ilk of “stay the course” followers who want to legislate their way out of an adaptation of the business model. Let’s get to the task at hand…

Not that I’ve ever said otherwise. With all of my railing against the Marburger plan and the AP, a few detractors have jumped to the conclusion that I don’t support any kind of copyright protection – which is just absurd.

What I have been railing against for weeks now isn’t an opposition to tough copyright law, it’s big news media trying to legally change the online marketplace to benefit themselves (and not content providers as a whole).

Facts should not be owned, but one person’s word-for-word summation of those facts should be. If a reporter took the time to investigate and write an enterprise story – other content entities should give him or her credit and link to their piece prominently when they choose to write from the original work.

Could copyright law use an update to account for the digital sphere? Absolutely – but not at the expense of the free exchange of ideas and analysis online. We in the news business are supposed to be all about that, remember?

The microformat will essentially encapsulate AP and member content in an informational “wrapper” that includes a digital permissions framework that lets publishers specify how their content is to be used online and which also supplies the critical information needed to track and monitor its usage.

The registry also will enable content owners and publishers to more effectively manage and control digital use of their content, by providing detailed metrics on content consumption, payment services and enforcement support. It will support a variety of payment models, including pay walls.

It’d be really cool if their system actually made it any more difficult to illegally use content. They didn’t seem to have a very good idea of what this system was really about.  Not to cater to the word crowd, they also included this ridiculous graphic of the system that has been mocked everywhere.

I honestly don’t understand the AP’s DRM thing all that well (that graphic alone boggled my mind), but I do know it isn’t a solution to what might not even really be a problem and it makes them look pretty dumb for touting it so much. I’ll let the experts tell you about it instead:

• DRM for news? Inside the AP’s plan to “wrap” its content – Ars Technica – The AP seemed to believe it was launching some awesome software that protected its work from all manner of copying. Ars Technica and others say, “Not really.” Yet another misunderstanding of copyright and technology from my friends in Old News
• Associated Press claims to have discovered magic anti-news-copying beans – Boing Boing – And more on the AP’s misstatements about it’s new DRM content management system drawing ire from bloggers. The mock graphic is especially head-shaking.
• Is There Really A ‘Piracy’ Problem For Newspapers? | Techdirt – Techdirt – who has had some of the best analysis of this debate – nails it. Is it really a copyright problem at all? Or is this just the last-ditch effort by big content producers to level the playing field without innovating?

What’s more disconcerting about the AP and it’s quest to protect its content is the motive behind it – which does interest me a great deal.

In a New York Times article about their copyright quest, AP President Tom Curley seemed to be even crazier about use of their content than what the Marburger plan suggests:

Tom Curley, The A.P.’s president and chief executive, said the company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. In an interview, he specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article, a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, news aggregators and blogs.

Yes, the AP wants you to have a license even to link to their content, let alone quote it or use it in any way. If you aren’t familiar with the Fair Use Doctrine – you probably wouldn’t know how much this violates the spirit behind it. Pat Thornton had a few thoughts on this – more importantly, if the AP even acknowledges the existence of Fair Use when it comes to their content. It is a new age, but so far, headlines and links have been considered Fair Use.

But what is Fair Use in the digital age? Should the law be re-examined for the culture of the Internet? I think so – at least to lay out those word-of-mouth rules that vary from site to site about content use.

C.W. Anderson has a few great ideas outlined for the revamp of Fair Use for the web that the likes of the Marburgers and the AP should take seriously. You should read it, but here’s a recap:

1. Where you link to the original story and how you link to it matters. Link early and often – and give credit where it is due.
2. Consider if the site appropriating the content is adding a comment function when the originator of the content did not.This is an added value on their site that only leads to more discussion and reading of the original story.
3. What is the balance between the value added by the appropriating site and the amount of original content used?
4. What is the purpose of the site using the content?

Are these issues sticky? Of course – but at least he’s asking the right questions. A lot of copyright law, particularly Fair Use, is about evaluating use of content to make sure we’re sharing without giving away the farm.  It’s about the open marketplace of ideas (again) – and online, that ideal is more important than ever.

Though David Marburger has been on a new media tour trying to explain his plan is less than 2,000 words – he has been making the point to tell us what the proposal isn’t:

1. It doesn’t “advocate a statutory 24-hour moratorium on rewriting news reports originated by others” (though that’s certainly not what David Marburger says here and here, among many other places.

2. They don’t oppose linking to original content (like Google News does). Sorry if I said they did. Really, they oppose common RSS feeds that have summaries with the links.

Honestly, though, the best look at the proposal’s intentions can be found in the comments area of the on Techdirt’s original analysis. Read the entire exchange of comments between TechDirt writers and the Marburgers and tell me that this proposal isn’t aiming for the law to make competition with newspapers illegal.

Marburger cites sites like the Daily Beast rather than aggregators as the real enemy. He believes a law is necessary to make it so they can’t write up a similar online piece based on the facts originally reported elsewhere. There’s been all kinds of claims as to why this is a problem:

1. These sites drive down online ad rates and free-ride on original reporting to make money. My take: They aren’t making much money from advertising, for one. Secondly, if they can charge a better ad rate, it’s called undercutting the competition – something that is quite legal and encouraged in American business. We might not like the outcome when it doesn’t benefit us, but it doesn’t make it illegal.

2. The newer stories get better placement on Google because they look like the same story and are newer. I say: Then get your site better optimized for search engines. If these sites have better placement, then good for them for being good at SEO. The reason big online news sites have bad SEO is because we move stories around, discontinue link availability after a certain amount of time and run buggy scripts that goof up our sites. They’re doing better because they worked at it – also, not illegal.

3. They are taking content wholesale. Again, I ask – who are the Marburgers, newspapers or the law to determine how much of this rewriting is illegal and who it applies to? I work at an online news site much like that of the PD and we rewrite existing online stories all of the time. I’ll bet they do too. We put ads on these stories and make money off of them – are we the enemy? Or just the new players in online media?

Maybe I’m misrepresenting their plan – but it isn’t for lack of trying. I’ve read the whole thing and all of David Marburger’s explanations of it. They say it isn’t an assault on free market competition, but then make statements that seem to say exactly that.

I won’t back your silly plan as it stands now – and no self-respecting journalist should. Eliminating competition isn’t a fix for newspapers’ ills and it’s downright disgusting how it is being peddled to the not-very-savvy journos among us who are desperately looking to back a magic cure-all.

Our industry was built on competition and the free marketplace of ideas. So, let’s pull ‘em up, shall we? Get out there and innovate ourselves a future instead of crying to the principal about how some new kid is stealing our lunch money.

We all know is that Connie Schultz (again, big fan) was completely wrong in her assertions and her interpretation of the Marbuger plan and thus completely derailed the discussion of online copyright by going after bloggers.

Of course, she won’t outright say this, but would rather continue to assert how much better journalists are with facts than bloggers even as bloggers are the ones finding the facts on the Marburger plan.

I have been in contact with several Plain Dealer employees who, while they might not be defending Connie, they are distancing themselves while still blindly supporting the copyright proposal. They claimed via emails and Facebook messages that Schultz does not speak for the newspaper (which is true) and that the paper itself doesn’t back the Marburger plan (which isn’t).

I’m sorry to go after my friends who are desperately seeking some magical fix for the newspaper industry’s problems – but they don’t exist and going after bloggers certainly is not the answer.

Facepalm, again. It makes me sad this is happening with a respectable journalist – and the whole mess is pulling the rest of us in by association.