Yet another “academic” call has been made to change U.S. copyright law to provide special protection for mainstream news sources – and again, these academics ignore the very basics of what it means to aggregate news online.
This time, the nonsense comes out of the Wharton School, who one would think knows a thing or two about business.
The entire essay is based on the assertion that newspapers and print media are in trouble because one can access the first paragraphs of those outlets’ stories on sites like Google News. For reasons that are not clearly explained, but rather assumed, the essayists insist:
This suggests tighter restrictions on the re-use of the intellectual property of others. Fair use doctrine was never intended to protect nearly instantaneous re-posting or re-broadcast.
Aside: Since when is showing the first paragraph of a news story and providing a link to the original site re-posting or re-broadcasting?I get the impression the authors don’t distinguish between those who literally steal news stories in full and those who merely aggregate.
Their solution? Bar the aggregation of daily news stories for 24 hours after publication (in other words, after they’ve outlived their usefulness) and bar aggregation of weekly news for one week.
This alleged problem and proposed solution have numerous flaws.
1. If your first paragraph is all your story has to offer that’s worth reading, you have bigger problems than web traffic. Did everyone forget how writing works? If you write a good story with a solid lede, people will want to read more than is available on Google. It really is that simple. Better writing = more click-throughs. More click-throughs = more online ad revenue.
2. And furthermore, most news sites actually write those summarizing ledes and super basic headlines because they actively are working to be listed high in web searches. Yes, they want Google to use their stories for reason #2. You can’t beg Google to take your content and then complain when they do.
3. Somehow the academics also seem to gloss over the fact that the Googles of the world are the #1 source of incoming traffic to news websites. They lament the declining online ad revenue, but fail to mention that what ad revenue news sites get is largely due to traffic from aggregators.
4. The essayists close with:
We believe that copyright law needs to be revised, and made both shorter and more draconian if journalism is to survive and (2) we believe that the hot news doctrine may offer some relief to traditional media, but not in its current, 90 year old form.
If page views are the goal, keep those comments a-comin’
By Mandy
On March 31, 2010
In Industry News & Notes
While it is well-documented that online page views are a flawed metric, most news websites still use it to measure “success” of stories and the performance of employees (like me). In thinking about the possibility of eliminating online comments from news stories, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out how that would affect page views.
Fact is, many website visitors, as much as they may complain about comments, love to read them. Cincinnati.Com gets a lot of traffic just to the comment sections associated with stories. In January alone, Cincinnati.Com got more than 700,000 page views to just the comments on stories (not counting blogs, forums, etc.). When we choose to take comments off of certain stories, I can see the effect it has on page views in our analytics analysis.
So what? Maybe we want to take the high road, page views be damned, right?
Dream on.
This comment backlash has revealed another “have your cake and eat it too” problem for the news industry. We want the page views, but don’t feel comfortable with the sort of content that tends to bring them in.
I speak from experience when I say that nothing is more likely to make a newsroom editors exude multiple personalities quite like the almighty page view. One minute they’re railing on about how we’re above using non-news linkbait online. The next, they’re in a froth over a party girl photo gallery with hundreds of thousands of page views, asking for more of the same. When your job depends on it, it can be rough to keep up.
Have I posted or promoted a story because I knew it would get comments (and thus, page views)? Absolutely. It happens on every size of news site and blog. We attempt to balance our tastes and news judgment with the harsh and unpleasant realities of online revenue every single day.
I really doubt news execs are really willing to give up the multiple millions of page views associated with comments on stories every year. Maybe, just maybe, they’d instead be willing to invest a bit of money and personnel in making those comments a bit better via good moderation.
Maybe I’m the one who’s dreaming?