Laws that could doom journalism
May 19th, 2009G’day Bruce! How are ya bruce? Fine thanks, Bruce!
Two Bruces, Sanford and Brown wrote a piece in the Saturday 16 May WaPo opining that “It is unrealistic to demand new business models from the press without giving it the legal tools to succeed.“
The world changes. We’ve got this thing called the Internet. It makes wide distribution of information from person-to-person and point-to-point, mind-numbingly easy. If you have a business model which depends on distribution of information or media being difficult or limited, you need to come up with a better business model.
If you don’t want people to easily search/crawl your intellectual property, do not put it online. It is that simple. If you want to hide it behind a subscription-only service, as the Wall Street Journal and others have done, you have that option. The tradeoff will be that fewer people will find your IP and talk about it and share it with others. You have to make that choice.
Newspapers are not suffering because Google makes their content easier to find. According to the Newspaper Association of America (via WSJ.com), newspaper circulation peaked in 1984, ten years before a public internet; fifteen years before blogs really gained traction. Moreover, Craigslist or eBay are typically blamed for eliminating the presumably once-lucrative classifieds from papers’ revenue streams, but that has everything to do with adaptation to the technological landscape and nothing to do with copyright law.
The Bruces offer several legal remedies; all of them bad:
- Limit the content a search engine can scrape, spider or read from a site
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Bad for at least two reasons:
- There is already a remedy: take your content offline. Easy. Painless. No lawyers. End of story.
- How do you know ahead of time what a search engine (or its clients, among them a large and growing proportion of your readers) is interested in? Ten years on, it may not be the lede that’s interesting but the source quoted near the bottom of the article. Search engines make it easy for people to find you. Why would you want to make that difficult?
- Protect against poaching “hot” news stories, i.e. giving someone the exclusive right to a chunk of information so they can profit from it
- Plagiarism is already illegal and that’s not what this is about. It’s about granting what amounts to a patent on a certain piece of information. How do you define that piece of information? Who sets the time limits? Can I patent information about myself or my company that might be embarrassing in order to prevent people from disseminating it legally? Expression of ideas and information is protected under copyright, but the information itself is not. If you don’t want other people to share that information, don’t share it yourself.
- Eliminate ownership restrictions (and later:) Grant an antitrust exemption for media companies
- Great, how has that worked out for you so far? Readership up? Record sales up? Quality up? I have not read or heard a reasonable argument yet that having even fewer voices on the media landscape will improve any of these things, and the Bruces don’t even try here.
- Encourage media through tax incentives
- Sure, whatever. This is certainly the least disagreeable suggestion in the article. But is that the problem? There’s not enough tax incentives out there for large media operations to go and get the story?
Of course, I’ve read Clay Shirky’s article on the media revolution we’re experiencing right now. Nobody really knows how this is all going to shake out. I suspect it’s going to go something like this:
- We’ll get a handful of national news providers. The distinction between network television networks and newspapers will blur because everything is online and the same content is consumed in a variety of different ways. NYTimes will compete more directly with MSNBC or CNN.
- These national providers will make money through a variety of means, combining subscriptions for premium content or membership (community), advertising, and sponsorship.
- Local and regional providers, the ones whose lunch is really being eaten by craigslist on one side (revenue), and bloggers on the other (attention), need to figure out what they’re doing. The successful ones are going to gravitate to an advertising and aggregation model. They will hire or syndicate beat bloggers (I’m all for ditching that word, considering its baggage) who concentrate on specific issues and whose income is driven by readership.
- Something like an artist/management/agent relationship will develop with certain writers. Small “issue” blogs will get income from advertising and donations, while engaging in business relationships that enhance their profile and provide services like art, editing and publicity. This is already happening with blog properties like Huffington Post, Gawker, BoingBoing and many other successful blogs.
