Dispatches from the living amongst journalism's walking dead

Month: July 2009

Recommended reading: Innovation in the newspaper world

Speaking of the need for innovation, here’s a few innovative ideas I’ve read about this week:

Revisiting the Marburger plan (it’s still terrible)

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

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.

‘Flash is overrated’ – and other links

Really, Plain Dealer?!?

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….

Trib among those handing over the keys

In regards to dropping support of Digg (which I wrote about a couple of days back), this is the kind of stuff I’m talking about:

From the site of the Chicago Tribune

From the site of the Chicago Tribune

This is what is on every article on the site of the Chicago Tribune (I got it from this one).

It sort of says, “Please, send my reporters’ stories to Digg where they can use it to get more web traffic at our expense. I’m OK with getting nothing in return, after all, my company is only under Chapter 11 right now. I’m sure I can spare it.”

Recommended reading: Content, traffic and pay walls

It’s time to cut off support for Digg

Digg.com has been into more shenanigans – prompting this content provider to ask: Have they gone too far? And if so – why do we in online media continue to support them?

On Monday, Mashable confirmed that Digg surreptitiously changed the behavior of its short URLs in a fashion that diverts web traffic intended for content publishers’ sites to Digg.com.

The move has the social web in an uproar – and should have media websites shaking in their boots. It seems that social media site many of us in online news have taken to caring and feeding with the content that makes it so popular has turned on us in a big way.

Digg URLs are/were very popular with users of Twitter and other microblog services wishing to share links. Then, without alerting its users, Digg has made it so those shortened external links no longer go to that great blog entry or article you wanted to share – but rather it links to directly to Digg.com. Do not pass go, do not collect your page views. In short, the Digg URLs are not shortned URLs at all, but rather a Digg-exclusive traffic driver.

Only tonight has Digg at least somewhat rolled back this change to restore previously used Digg URLs to their original destinations. Even so – they intend to go forward with the traffic diversion plan despite the outcry from users.

I suppose we in online news should have seen this coming. It wasn’t the first sign of aggression from Digg.  I’d say Digg has more than proven that it is a direct threat to content publishers – so why are we still supporting it? Oh, you didn’t know you were supporting Digg? Better take a look at your site.

Check out the articles, blogs, photos and any other content you create. Chances are, there is some method for sharing that content online with the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Delicious and, yes, Digg. Sometimes that is a button that says Digg, other times it may be a service like the ShareThis button you see on this blog.

See, at one time, Digg was a real boon for online publishers. If your story was popular on Digg, the influx of page views coming from its army of users could be staggering. We wanted everything to be on Digg. In fact, we made it as easy as possible to get our content listed on their site by making these links as prominent as possible.

But it turns out in doing all that reaching out – we contributed to the creation of the very bully who’s stealing publishers’ lunch money. Even though it might not make much of a difference,  we in the online news biz need to take back our tiny corners of the web and at least remove Digg from our pages.

Aside: I know I seem like a hypocrite calling for this, being that I haven’t figured out what to do with my own blog yet, but bear with me.

I’ll fight with online naysayers ’til the cows come home about aggregators and Google – but Digg is a credible threat. It’s time to let them go. Besides, if your site is like that of my employer – they are a drop in the bucket compared to Twitter and Facebook these days anyway. Good riddance.

Twitter tips and news bits

  • How to get ahead of the meme – Great insight to the spread of memes and tip-of-the-tongue phrases through the internets. Old school news media doesn’t have to lag behind – and we don’t always.
  • How to Make Your Tweets More Useful – Please, yes, make them more useful. Unlike most of the  tip-givers out there, I don’t think it is wrong to share details of your day. that is, unless you want your Twitter account to be taken seriously as a news source, then maybe not (guilty as charged over here).

Quick links and an update

It’s been a busy time professionally for me, so I apologize for not updating with any regularity. If you haven’t been reading about it, my company Gannett, has laid off more than 1,000 employees, including 101 at my paper. I am one of the lucky ones, thankfully.

While I still pull my head together, I have gathered a few links of interest. Check ’em out.

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