Zombie Journalism

Dispatches from the living amongst journalism's walking dead

Tag: law

Rest easy journos, the government is coming to the rescue!

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On June 14, 2010

In Industry News & Notes

I keep hearing on the internets that journalism is in trouble and is in need of “saving”. It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…the Feds? No seriously.

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.

Journalism and the Interwebs: A Reading Guide

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On December 11, 2009

In Recommended Links, Surviving

I read a lot of industry blogs and they generally all boil down to two topics: complaining about the Internet (or complaining about people complaining about the Internet) and lamenting the future of news.  It makes it all a little tough to keep up with what actual issues we’ve settled this year and what’s still out there to be figured out.

Thankfully, the Nieman Lab Blog took the time to assemble what dominated discussion regarding the future of news this year and takes a look at what will likely be hot topics next year as the industry continues to reel and (hopefully) evolve.  Most notably, next year seems to be heading in a direction of looking beyond the industry itself to what the affects the changes in the industry will (or should) have on journalism education, politics and public policy.

And in the second camp of journalism industry blog posts, Paul Bradshaw reviews all of the complaints news folks have had against The Internets over the years in one fell swoop. From hating on Google to opposing blogs and user-provided news, he offers something of a summation of just how depressing some news execs can be when it comes to that which they don’t understand.

Journalists should fight for the rights of bloggers

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On October 5, 2009

In Industry News & Notes

That’s right, put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Lots of journalists, bloggers and others who work to uncover the truth have been excited at the prospect of Congress finally passing a federal shield bill to prevent reporters from being forced to testify as to the identities of confidential sources. When it came out last week that the Senate version of the federal shield bill would exclude unpaid bloggers and citizen journalists, the enthusiasm was dampened (for some of us).

The Senate version of the bill limits the law’s protection to a very strict definition of a journalist. It would only apply to paid employees or contractors who work for publishers of various media and wire services. The House version, in contract, only limits the law to those who gather news “for a substantial portion of [their] livelihood or for substantial financial gain”.

The good folks at the Citizen Media Law Project suggest this exclusion is due to most senators’ unfamiliarity with citizen journalists. I daresay it also has to do with the fact that citizen journalists and bloggers are not going to get the backing of the big journalism organizations pushing the law in the first place. A lot of big media, I’d expect, would love to have exclusive protections to prevent bloggers and citizen journalists from scooping them on whistleblower-type stories.

In my opinion, the change seems to go against the entire premise for the law in the first place – and we should all be upset about it. To hell with competition from bloggers and unpaid journalists – we need all the watchdogs we can get as the numbers of professional journalists deplete.

Moreover, any professional journalist who agrees that the change should exclude unpaid bloggers should consider that most of us are one layoff away from becoming “unpaid journalists” ourselves. Consider those ex-newspaper employees out there starting their own operations from scratch…don’t your former colleagues deserve the same protection? Doesn’t anyone who’s uncovering the truth?

Aside from the limits of the protection, the White House is trying to push through changes that would make it so the shield does not apply in cases where the confidential source leaks information pertaining to national security. Stay tuned on that front – it just might have legs (or kill the bill altogether).

‘Flash is overrated’ – and other links

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On July 29, 2009

In Recommended Links

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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