OK, in a nutshell:
Connie Shultz, the Cleveland Plain Dealer's Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist (and lovely wife of Ohio Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown), wrote about trying to protect newspapers' rights to their reporting. She and a publishing attorney, with the help of his economics professor brother, came up with something that involved a 24-hour copyright for news. She got a lot of flak from bloggers, so she wrote a second column defending their idea. The Plain Dealer's ombudsman, Ted Diadiun, got into the act by broadcasting a video that disparaged the work of bloggers as unimportant and unoriginal, even calling them pipsqueaks.[1]
Got it?
The principals again:
(She really is lovely, isn't she?)
But don’t get too caught up in these people! This post is not about them. It’s about this guy, my recently turned 19-year-old son, Daniel:
Daniel looked over my shoulder as I watched Ted Diadiun’s video (Thanks King Kaufman and Katherine Mieszkowski) and commented that broadening copyright laws moves us into “dangerous territory.” He went off to do something useful, and I looked up Connie’s original column, which all of a sudden sounded really reasonable to me. I’m suggestible like that and have gotten into the habit of running things past this son of mine for help in clarifying my thinking. So I sent him a link to the column in question with this email:[3]
Daniel,
Here is Connie Shultz’s original column that caused all the fuss. Shultz is a regular columnist for the Plain Dealer—well, not “regular,” since she won a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting recently (a huge deal) and is married to Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown. I guess BuzzFlash (Jeff Jarvis) created a stir on his blog about it, so Shultz wrote a second column. Also, Ted Diadiun (PD ombudsman or “reader representative”) weighed in in his weekly PD column. We saw his little interview about it as well.
After reading Shultz’s column, does her argument have any more merit than when I described it? I looked at the links and places like Newser do indeed just summarize stories without linking readers to the original.
Mom
I came home from work today to this response from Daniel, who’d taken the time to read and digest the information (Yes, he was sitting across the house from me at his own computer at the time. Do other families operate this way?) I’ve highlighted the things that seem especially well articulated or insightful to me.
[No salutation]
There is no doubt that the whole news industry is at a turning point and something needs to be done. But I still would argue that making copyright law more strict isn't the way to go about it. It's a similar problem that is happening with the TV industry with the advent of the internet. Instead of embracing new technology and finding a business model to support the viewing of TV and movies online, these companies have gotten laws passed (i.e. DMCA, digital millennium copyright act) that simply try to legislate the problem away. But that just leads to internet users going "underground" and has lead to rampant movie and TV show piracy online because there is no legal way to access the media on a computer without resorting to piracy. (The networks are coming around and now almost all current shows can be accessed online.)
I think that what needs to be done is to try to educate consumers about the idea of primary sources. If the Plain Dealer breaks a story, then they are the ones with the most information on it, and so anyone who mentions the story will end up referencing the PD. I know when I read something on a blog I always try to find the original source (normally linked somewhere) to read the actual news report instead of some joes interpretation of it. And this goes back to the failure of the PD in particular to embrace the internet. In the age of the internet, it is ridiculous to expect someone to say hey i heard this interesting story, let me leave my computer and go find my newspaper and read more about it.
This just brings back the inherent problem with the internet in its current form which is that ad revenue alone isn't enough to support the kind of journalism that newspapers are currently doing. So there will have to be a transition period, and something like micropayments (users easily paying tiny amounts for web pages, i.e. you read an article on the PD website and pay 5 cents) will need to emerge.
More stringent copyright laws would also lead to an unfair disadvantage for small blogs because they would be afraid of being sued even if they did original research. Say a small blog breaks a news story, but at nearly the same time a major newspaper does as well, and the newspaper proceeds to sue the blogger. Bloggers would be afraid of posting things because they don't have the legal resources to defend themselves against a lawsuit, even if they are doing nothing wrong.
Now the article mentioned word for word copies of news stories, which I am under the impression was already illegal under current copyright law, so I'm not sure what the deal is there.
It seems to me that the only way for news organizations to stay in business is to alter their business model, and find a way to profit using the internet to their advantage. Clearly this is possible as sites such as salon exist, and the wall street journal seems to be taking advantage of the internet as well. Trying to get more stringent copyright laws passed seems to just be a last ditch effort on the part of newspapers unwilling or not knowing how to adapt to the times trying to legislate themselves into a position where they don't have to adapt.
Isn’t he smart?
I think he’s got it just right.
Seriously, this is an interesting, difficult topic and I know that OS is full of both bloggers and newspaper people. Well, we're all bloggers, but clearly there's a whole slew of professional journalists here too. So I agree with those who've suggested that this shouldn't become a slimefest between these two overlapping groups of writers. Brainstorming is good; contempt not so much. While Mr. Diadiun's regular denunciation of the incivility on the blogosphere can at times feel warranted even to those of us who practically live here, his own disdain for bloggers shines bright.
Anyway, I’m proud of Daniel's astuteness and impressed by the clarity of his thinking, and I’m so happy for Joan Walsh who needn't worry a minute about her daughter's future.
Oh, hadn’t I mentioned? Joan and I have decided to dispense with the anxiety of the dating game and just arrange a marriage between our children. Neither one of them knows about it at this point, but who wouldn’t want to marry my thoughtful, smart, a-little-bit-shy (like Sherrod Brown, come to think of it!) son or her gorgeous, kind daughter? Joan, please get back to me on whether you prefer the formal or the casual wallet photo--I'm sure you're going to want to be showing all your friends, not to mention N herself who may be interested. Oh, and mention that, in addition to running his own business, he’s off to a market research study at the moment, participating in a focus group on coffee of all things, to earn a few extra bucks. She’ll like that.
Gratuitous video of Daniel on the night before he left for his first year of college last fall: (He was installing a light on our shed so his brothers could play badminton after dark. Completely unsolicited, I kid you not. Yes, that’s Peace of Mind by Boston blaring on the speakers. He’s cool like that.)
Last thing: Please disregard the interior state of our shed. Our actual house looks nothing like that. Nothing. Not at all.
[1] Upon reflection, pipsqueak is a word I’d never actually heard spoken aloud before watching Ted’s video. It reminds me of something Mr. Wilson might say to Dennis.
[2] Senator Brown regularly shows up on lists of Sexiest Senators. He’s got that shy, rueful demeanor and rumpled Columbo look that many of us find irresistible.
[3] You’ll note that I had to explain who the Plain Dealer people are. He’s a well-read kid, but like most teenagers, “well-read” doesn’t involve actual newspapers. I suppose he and W might have that in common.
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I'm happy for you to come back for a repeat performance, libertarius, if you're willing :)
Out of the Mouths of Babes
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I'll just say I found your son's analysis of the copyright wars between the old and new media to be one of the more intellignet reflections on the political economy of blogging that I've seen here.
RATED
"So there will have to be a transition period, and something like micropayments (users easily paying tiny amounts for web pages, i.e. you read an article on the PD website and pay 5 cents) will need to emerge."
The problem is that you can look at an article for a few seconds and find that it's not really what you're looking for. I'd hate to get dinged ever time I happened to click on an article.
I wonder if there isn't already a business model available. For example, I have a Rhapsody account. For a monthly payment of $13.00 I have access to, I don't know, maybe a couple million songs. I just pay one fee, not a fee for every song I listen to.
I'd be happy to do something like that with newspaper articles. You could have an aggregation service that would compile the articles from hundreds of newspapers around the country, and for a monthly fee you could subscribe and have access to all of them. You could have ads that were specific to the content of each article. And newspapers would be compensated by some formula according to the popularity of their articles.
But this leads to another question: is the concept of the "newspaper" obsolete? Let's say that I'm a reporter for a newspaper. In the world of electronic text, why do I need "the newspaper?" Why can't I continue to report and submit articles to our electronic aggregation service and get paid according to the readership of my articles, along with a little cut of the revenue generated from the ads? Let's say that today I work for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and people have to go to the CPD to read my articles. In an electronic future, with our hypothetical news aggregation service, anyone in the world could read my articles, and my income would depend on the popularity of my reporting.
From the point of view of the reader, this would give great flexibility and choice. My "newspaper" would be something that I create -- the reporters and kinds of articles around the country that I personally select. The "Cleveland Plain Dealer" would not exist as a "newspaper," but just as an association of reporters.
In other words, the value of a newspaper is not "the newspaper," but the content. Electronic subscription and distribution gives us the ability to separate the value from the non-value-added and only pay for the content rather than having to support the infrastructure.
That's my idea anyway.
And I think your idea is really a good one. It's like all the journalists are independent contractors. At this point, I suppose you could say that model is already in existence; that is, there are probably bloggers who are trying to make a living charging money for their blogs but not succeeding. I assume you're not suggesting involving legislation, as Connie Schultz is, so how would this model evolve? Perhaps the bankruptcy of all the newspapers at once would simply create a vacuum, the need, for serious, independent reporting. Because it's true that many online ventures simply rely on the reporting of the Big Guns. I've wondered about this before and after some discussion, my son always comes back to the free market. He is optimistic that there will always be a segment of people willing to pay for "real" news. So the independents--who would perhaps register with some aggregate service--could be cobbled together to form anybody's "newspaper."
As I mentioned, what we now call "newspapers" would be associations of journalists, probably focused on covering events in particular locations. These associations wouldn't be necessary, but would make it easier to subscribe to news from a particular location.
You could also have independent journalists involved. With a central news aggregation service why, for example, would Glenn Greenwald need Salon.Com? He wouldn't.
I think that kind of model would create all sorts of possibilities. And I think it would also be financially feasible. It would depend on having an adequate number of subscribers, but if that's simply how people got their news, I don't think that would be a problem. You'd also have to have some way of reasonably dividing up the revenue. But I don't see anything in this model that would be a "deal breaker." If I had a hundred million dollars laying around to get it started, I'd try it out.
"And newspapers would be compensated by some formula according to the popularity of their articles." and
"and my income would depend on the popularity of my reporting."
because I worried about the trashy stories selling more and attracting bigger audiences...
but then I realized that that's what already happens, so it wouldn't be a new problem!
Rated
Agree with his points about small bloggers and about the futility of the media trying to legislate themselves out of the problems.
Also, I will not judge your shed if you will not judge my car.
But I do think that a business model somewhere between a subscription cost for a newspaper--and a subscription cost for a group of newspapers maybe including independent journalists like mishima666 mentions could work.
Personally I also think that news should be nonprofit. Just as I think schools should be nonprofit. Although, I don't think its just the profit model of newspapers that have taken them into their current lowly state, but the fact that they have lost the trust of the public. What's funy is that t.v. news is usually much worse than newspapers, but we just expect so much less than t.v. Why didn't US journalists do their job in warning us about Bush's lies before they led us to a three trillion dollar war? and why didn't they (even the financial analyists) see the financial crisis coming? Could this be the reason a lot of people don't see the point in bothering?
I think we might need those curmudgeonly journalists again..not the sunny optimists we enjoy watching on t.v. but those surly grumpy misanthropes who may not have many friends, but who weren't afraid to tell the truth as it is. Those sort of journalists (who's faces worked better in radio or print) seem to be down for the count, and that's the loss (in my view) for readers who care what's actually happening in the world.
(whew. sorry so long...! I guess i had to make up for a few lost days). And that's cute about your son and joan's daughter.
I loved the video. I think we should all post video of us doing really basic stuff like this. It's such a sweet window into the shed and soul.
Yes, son is wise beyond his years.
Your piece was really laid out well, I wanted to add. Pretty and inviting to read.
The nonprofit thing scares some people, I think, because all of a sudden it sounds like government-run news like the Soviet Union or China or something. But I don't see why it can't be paid for by taxes but independent of government.
I agree that people seem to have lost trust in news sources--the funny thing it comes from both sides: Liberals like us point to the media's complicity re the Iraq War while the right talks about the "liberal media" all the time. But that's just here, of course, and the newspaper is dying everywhere. I think it mostly relates to the inevitable forward march of technology. I don't choose to get news from the internet over the Plain Dealer for any reason more compelling than that it is just easier and fits better in my lifestyle.
Hey Julie--thanks for stopping by and being so nice :)