Zombie Journalism

Dispatches from the living amongst journalism's walking dead

Tag: facepalm

Revisiting the Marburger plan (it’s still terrible)

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On July 31, 2009

In Doomsayers, Industry News & Notes

As my friend Dana noted on the last post on the subject, the Marburgers are doing a bit of a better job of explaining their plan. It makes a little more sense, but it is still ridiculously misguided and built to favor big media.

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.

3. And we agree on one thing: Pay walls are bad.

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.

Connie, dude, please cut it out

By

On July 31, 2009

In Doomsayers, Industry News & Notes

The outcry against bloggers gets louder in Cleveland. As we here in Cincinnati have embraced the local blogosphere by pulling bloggers into our network (more on that later), there’s a war brewing to the north.

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.

Really, Plain Dealer?!?

By

On July 23, 2009

In Doomsayers, Industry News & Notes

First of all, it should be stated that I’m a big fan of The Cleveland Plain Dealer and Connie Schultz, who is a Pulitzer Prize winner and fellow Kent State alum. That said, they are completely out of their minds. Today, they give yet another gigantic middle finger to the entire Internet in a “story” that reads a bit more like a very smug blog post promoting their misguided efforts to stop the interwebs from doing what interwebs do.

Some backstory, if you don’t know it:

In what started as a plan to get a lawyer’s name in the news became an incredibly uninformed column by Schultz and eventually evolved into embarrassing sideshow that has a newspaper pulled into an effort trying to limit the First Amendment rights of bloggers and asking other sites not to give them web traffic. Oh, and it also calls aggregators, RSS readers and bloggers “parasites”. Nice work, guys (facepalm).

This “plan” to change U.S. copyright law, put forth by David and Daniel Marburger (brothers and a lawyer and economist, respectively), seeks to ban aggregators and bloggers from linking or paraphrasing news content within the first 24 hours of its creation.

TechDirt has an excellent analysis on all of the things that are wrong about this half-baked plan. The least of which is that it conveniently ignores significant traffic their own site gets from aggregators every day. I can speak with some knowledge on that fact – Cleveland’s website regularly features links to our stories that regularly show up as popular referrers in our traffic reports (and we love them for it).

As Jeff Sonderson also points out, the PD would be outraged if they themselves were held to this standard. We all would:

How would the Cleveland P-D like it if their new copyright law prohibited them for 24 hours from reporting plane and train crashes, celebrity deaths, political scandals, or anything else that Twitter, TMZ, Talking Points Memo or the Drudge Report had first?

Schultz, for her part, really misrepresents aggregation in the first place. She says these “parasitic” aggregators “reprint or rewrite newspaper stories, making the originator redundant and drawing ad revenue away from newspapers at rates the publishers can’t match.”

Actually, a true aggregator would have a headline from the originating site with a description of the story – usually auto-generated by the original site – and a link back to the original story. You know, PD, if you don’t want your stories to go out to aggregators, maybe you shouldn’t make RSS feeds available for them in the first place. Just a thought.

The Marburger report, at least, somewhat seems to understand the term, but still has the wrong bad guy. Their focus is not actually on true aggregators, but rather on bloggers and other competition in the market who don’t have a reporter on the scene for the original report, but tend to write an analysis or report based on what the original source published. This is commonplace – and I can state as a matter of fact that it is done by “professional” news outlets every day. Not to mention it is a pretty standard practice of the AP, which is featured on the PD’s news pages. Et tu, Brute? (That’s sarcasm, kids)

Depressing, isn’t it? While I agree that copyright law needs to be updated for the digital age, this isn’t what I had in mind.

In a roundabout way, this all continues to prove my point about newspapers pointing fingers at the wrong bad guys. After all – they too have links to Digg and other social sharing sites on their stories and blogs. Funny the way it is….

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