Next up: Meatloaf Wednesday. Sorry, we can't sustain this kind of excitement.
On Monday Gladwell, the New Yorker writer, slammed Wired editor Anderson's book "Free" in a review. More than one person has pointed out the irony that Gladwell's negative review of "Free" is available for free on the New Yorker Web site while Anderson's book, which touts an economy based on the idea that information wants to be free, is not free.
Anderson responded with a blog post titled "Dear Malcolm, Why So Threatened?" which might not be entirely fair. Gladwell comes across as more skeptical of Anderson's theories than threatened by them.
If you're looking for a referee, business and marketing guru Seth Godin declares Anderson the winner, writing that it doesn't make sense to wonder if we want Free to be the future, not that I noticed Gladwell asking that. "Who cares if we want it?" Godin says. "It is."
You want threatened? Let's turn to Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Schultz, a lawyer, who notes that newspapers -- such as, well, hey, the Cleveland Plain Dealer -- sometimes do excellent investigative journalism and then argues that they should be saved by the government, which ought to curtail free speech on their behalf.
Schultz gets behind the idea of a couple of brothers, First Amendment lawyer David and economics professor Daniel Marburger, who say that copyright law should be tightened to prevent anyone from even paraphrasing news articles for 24 hours.
Seriously. Is there a better indication of how desperate the newspaper industry is than that? These people want to kill the very lifeblood of the news business, the free exchange of information, in order to save that business. I'm just going to hold out hope that they're actually very clever performance artists.
Jarvis, the author of "What Would Google Do?" calls the ideas in Schultz's column "dangerous" in a post on his Buzz Machine blog headlined, "First, kill the lawyers -- before they kill the news."
"So if the Plain Dealer reported exclusively that, say, the governor had just returned from a tryst with [an] Argentine lady, no one else could so much as talk about that for 24 hours," Jarvis writes, and then he puts on the italics: "A First Amendment lawyer said this."
Pointing to Schultz's and the Marburgers' claim that aggregators and the like are "free-riders" on the work of newspapers, Jarvis says, "They simply don't understand the economics of the internet. It's the newspapers that are free-riding, getting the benefit of links."
I suspect that not quite getting the economics of the Internet is Gladwell's problem too, though he is actively trying to understand in his piece about Anderson's book. I haven't read Anderson's book, so I couldn't tell you if he understands the economics of the Internet. Even if I had read it, I don't understand the economics of the Internet either, though I'm pretty sure I'm ahead of Schultz.
I'm just enjoying all the fighting. The answers are in there somewhere, probably. And if not? We still get meatloaf.
mandalp1
Richard Davis
Chris Rywalt
Blue Roses
whitenoise
Anupum Mehrotra
Salon.com
Comments
Similarly, iPhones are intimate, aesthetic devices, and the rich combination of it with applications and content creates a pleasant ecosystem in a way that reading a web site on IE 7 does not (http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php). This is why it might work to charge for the NYT on the iPhone but not on the web.
Yes, you could always get content from somewhere else. But that is completely beside the point for all but a vanishingly small number of technophiles.
Here is a nice Slate article on how some of the very examples Anderson cites are failing business models: http://www.slate.com/id/2216162/
One model that seems to be entirely absent from the debate, at least in the U.S., is the concept of independently funded public broadcasting. Like the BBC in Britain and the CBC in Canada. The BBC has been more successful because they always kept strict control, not of information, but of advertising. Private networks had to fork over part of the profits to fund public networks. In Canada we fund our public broadcasting from the ads for Hockey Night In Canada, although we've seen some pretty deep cuts in the last year. Nevertheless, I think the quality of our news is better than anything on the U.S. networks.
I suspect that Canada and Britain will make the transition to webased journalism much more easily because the concept of a well funded, but also independent, public broadcaster isn't as threatening or foreign to us.
But, as Gladwell, points out, at some point somebody has to fork over some money.
I think Anderson is only looking at one side of the equation, at least vis-a-vis the news industry. Certainly information gets passed around the internettubes as quickly as someone post about it but in the case of say the NYTimes or MSNBC there's a cost to gathering and disseminating that information. Free to me doesn't necessarily mean free to MSNBC.
I do agree with him that the news (and other) industry has to rethink their business models though as someone in the dead tree printed material industry and also looking to launch a digital one I have little idea what that should be at this point. Right now we're stuck at WHAT IS OUR VALUE * WHO IS IT VALUABLE TO = POTENTIAL REVENUE. When I figure out this valuable information, I will let everyone know.
For a fee.
: D
If I purchase Anderson's book, scan it using OCR and then convert those files to a PDF and post it to my web site and then throw a link to it on Twitter and Facebook and anywhere else I virtually wander do you think he and his publisher would be ok with that?
As for the notion that Schultz/Marburger want to curtail Free Speech, um, let's not all get hysterical here, everyone calm down, we do get meatloaf today.
After reading her column I'm not exactly sure what she is proposing. If she wants to curtail one site from posting a summary of an article with a link back to the originating site and the full article then I agree she nor the Marburger's understand the economics of the internet and how this is actually more beneficial to their news organizations. For example:
I don't read the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Ever. I have no intention of reading it. Ever. However, I do read The Beast and if there is a good chance if they summarized the dirty sheriff story there I would link back to the CPD to get the full article. Add one extra click to the number you present to advertisers. Multiply me by all the other people in the world who have no intention of ever reading the CPD but who now find themselves on its website through the courtesy of The Beast and other aggregators and it becomes significant.
On the other hand, if The Beast or some other aggregator is running the full article, even if it has a link back, well then I would think we don't need to rewrite any copyright laws as that in and of itself seems, to me, to be a violation of the CPD's copyright.
But as I said, before I would jump on the let's burn Schultz at the stake cause she wants to curtail free speech band wagon I would need to understand more of what they are speaking of when they say they want to put a 24-hour lock down on stuff. If it is this "Ideally, news originators' stories would be available only on their Web sites for the first 24 hours" I have no problem with it.
Additionally, and this is just an aside and I hope Jarvis is reading, you lose the argument. Not because you didn't make your point but because you did so in an infantile manner. Calling Marburger "an alleged First Amendment attorney", please, there is something to be said about presenting your opinion with a little decorum.
Anyway, when's the meatloaf? The local market has corn on the cob (silver queen) 6 for $2. I'll pick some up but I need a head count for dinner. : D