Zombie Journalism

Dispatches from the living amongst journalism's walking dead

Tag: Marburger

The myth of the “free ride”

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On August 6, 2009

In Industry News & Notes, Online Revenue Models

David Marburger took his show on the road this week with a much-emailed guest editorial in the LA Times titled “The free ride that’s killing the news business” (again with the hostile wording). Of course, I got this emailed to be from no less than 20 fellow journalists, all of whom seemed to not understand the online news business at large. He’s preaching to the choir of the same “stay the course” news people who got us here in the first place – and they love it.

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 the golden stat of pageviews.

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…

Stealing is wrong, so is a quest to own facts

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On August 6, 2009

In About This Site, Industry News & Notes, Online Revenue Models

Let’s get this out of the way: I don’t like it when anyone steals anyone else’s content. And by “stealing” I mean wholesale copying and pasting all of an original work or using any part of someone’s work without credit and a link back to the original content. Period.

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?

AP ignores Fair Use, treads into copyright debate

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On August 1, 2009

In Recommended Links

OK, so I know I’ve been all over the Marburger thing and completely ignored the whole AP thing. In short, the AP announced a new tool they think is going to protect their stories from copyright infringement and piracy:

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:

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.

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

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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.

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