• You have to read Five Key Reasons Why Newspapers Are Failing from Bill Wyman at Splice Today. It’s an excellent analysis of How We Got Here from someone with perspective both inside and outside the news business. A lot of it we newspaper types know already – but a lot of it we don’t want to acknowledge is part of the problem.
• Part Two: On how the monopolistic mindset, terrible web design and a rejection of new technology contributed to the fall.
• Newspaper war raises a question: Who keeps the tweeps? – Once a reporter builds a base in social media – who owns that base? If a newspaper gets claim to/responsibility for a reporters’ tweets (which seems to be the case), do they also own those followers? In this case, at least, I say yes. but not always. Likely not the last we’ll see from this debate.

How-Tos and Ideas:

• 10 Things You Must Do to Earn Your Audience’s Trust – Journalism has lost a lot of public trust of late – so these lessons should ring especially true for us. With so many online tools at our disposal, we should be good at this (but we usually aren’t).
• HOW TO: Take Advantage of FriendFeed’s Unique Features – Now that Facebook has purchased FriendFeed, I’d expect more people to take not of it’s network-combining power. Here’s some need-to-know tips on it.
• 10 Creative Contests Powered by Social Media – Great examples from Mashable for innovative online contests.
• Add context to news online with a wiki feature – again, more good ideas for news and opinion content that goes beyond comments.

More Social Media News

• Industry Moves: National Geographic Gets A VP Of Social Media – Can anyone else just not believe that it took the Times and now National Geographic this long to get a clue?
• TWITTER ANALYSIS: 40% of Tweets Are Pointless Babble – It should come as no surprise to anyone who lives on Twitter (like me), that tweets are largely empty. The ones of merit, though, are really worth it.
• Facebook’s New Privacy Features: A Complete Guide – Facebook’s always changing their game up. They’ve recently made it so anyone can see public profiles. Here’s a guide to how to adjust your settings.

• Facebook: No Sponsored Status Updates Allowed – So Facebook decides to keep it real (so to speak) and ban sponsored updates. The real question is – when will Twitter follow suit?

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?

• Xark!: The betrayal of the Fourth Estate – It’s a rather bitter and angry screed about journalism, but it has some good links in there that are of note to those interested in the less-discussed parts of the industry…
• Delfi’s readers may lose the right to comment stories | balticbusinessnews.com – It isn’t in the US, but it is notable that a government may force a newspaper to shut down comments on stories altogether.
• Las Vegas Newspaper Subpoenaed to Reveal Commenters’ Identities – If you haven’t heard about this yet – it is only the beginning. We’ve heard lots of rumblings at the local level about going to court to find out who our commenters are, but it hasn’t reached this point yet. Problem is, many systems (like ours) don’t record the info the plaintiffs seek anyway.
• How Journalists Use Facebook | About – Some good ideas for how journalists can use Facebook. One note: You don’t have to close off and make FB exclusively for work or personal content – they have plenty of options to filter your data to have the best of both worlds.
• How to keep tabs on local traffic using maps and social media :: 10,000 Words :: multimedia, online journalism news and reviews – There are some great ideas here for using social media and mapping to track traffic. Your idea doesn’t have to be fancy or time-consuming. In fact, you could just create a collaborative Google Map.
• Study Finds Online Video Usage Dramatically Overstated | MediaPost Publications – This study seems to conflict with others like it, but it seems believable, at least, that it’s too early to call it quits for TV.

• New ‘WSJ’ Conduct Rules Target Twitter, Facebook – These rules for WSJ staff could and should be applied at any news organization. You want your reporters to be out there in social media – but there’s so much potential for disaster if they don’t conduct themselves very well. These are good rules to live by.
• Why journalists deserve low pay | csmonitor.com – Not that I’m advocating to be paid less, but they have a point: If we can’t find a way to provide unique value in this new world, the pay may not last long.
• Twitter’s Big News has Huge Implications for Search – Website Magazine – If this plays out, web pages could be ranked according to user interest and relationships rather than relying on incoming links and SEO. In short – you should start promoting your content on the social web as if your job depended on it (cause it might).
• How a 1995 court case kept the newspaper industry from competing online – Excellent analysis about the early days of newspapers getting into online communities – and royally screwing it up for years to come thanks to fear established by Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy.
• The Top 7 types of Twitter avatars :: 10,000 Words – I always stress to the reporters and brands in our company that they HAVE to get a Twitter icon. I don’t care what it is – but it can’t be the default. I wouldn’t assume the person tweeting was any sort of professional if they didn’t have an image of some sort.