Laws to Save Journalism (or The Most Unintentionally Funny Thing I've Read All Day)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/15/AR2009051503000.html

by TomOfTTB • 17 years ago

27 26 17 years ago

I thought this was going to be a funny column about questionable laws intended to "save journalism".

Journalism does not need a bailout, but it does need a sort of "recovery act" to bring the legal landscape in line with today's publishing technologies.

These guys have learned their lesson well: When asking for a bailout, don't call it a bailout.

But to be fair, they didn't ask for any direct financial subsidies.

TomOfTTB3• 17 years ago

Good point on the title, I changed it to better reflect.

netsp• 17 years ago

I would far prefer direct subsidies to what this article implies.

Tangurena2• 17 years ago

There was an HN link a few days ago to an essay about why journalists deserve low pay (but I can't seem to find the HN story.

http://www.robertpicard.net/PDFFiles/whyjournalistsdeservelo...

The changes in news over the past 2 decades is huge and structural, and no amount of Congresscritters standing at the shore demanding that the tide not come in, well, none of that is going to make a difference. Print news has rendered themselves as irrelevant as buggy whip makers.

inerte3• 17 years ago

Don't editorialize the title, TomOfTTB.

TomOfTTB3• 17 years ago

People do it all the time. There's no rule against it. More to the point when someone (in this case me) submits an article what they are doing is sharing something they found interesting with the rest of the community.

In that sense I don't see how it's unreasonable to give my take on the article in the title.

inerte3• 17 years ago

Two wrongs don't make a right. The guidelines, although not rules, ask you not to do it. If the article is interesting, it'll get upvotes.

Your take might be different than mine, and more importantly, than the article author. If you thing the USA Senate (including a presidential candidate who snatched the popular vote), journalism's fate, new laws, and people with more power than we both deciding how we should digest information is "funny"... well... you're alienated.

Don't editorialize the title, it's just not cool. If you want to expand why you think it's funny, write a blog post or write a comment. I am sure we've never heard how the MSM doesn't "get" the internet, how their business models should change, how the hyper-local journalism is the future, etc... include a Bill O'Reilly video and I am sure you can also get Digg's frontpage.

And I am sorry for my agressive behaviour. It's 7am and I drank a few beers. Just don't editorialize the title, please.

knightinblue• 17 years ago

This is like watching dinosaurs attempting to do physics.

Everytime they hear Google mention the idea of 'opt out if you don't like it', they start crying 'Publishers should not have to choose between protecting their copyrights and shunning the search-engine databases that map the Internet'. So they want google to crawl their pages, and then pay them something on top for indexing them.

That's like asking the police to protect your neighborhood and then charging them a monthly fee on top for the policing.

It's this ridiculous sense of entitlement that's the most sickening out of all this.

stcredzero• 17 years ago

ridiculous sense of entitlement

Isn't that one of the portents of a revolution? Usually someone has some form of cognitive blinders on, so they don't see the impending disaster or at least the implications that will allow them to gracefully navigate it.

Also read as: Isn't this a sign of some big opportunity? To mangle a physics metaphor, tortured thinking is often a sign of something containing lots of potential energy, like a spring under compression or perhaps a section of continental crust. There may be a potential to profit when the energy is released. (Also the potential to get mashed up in the tumult.)

anamax• 17 years ago

> they start crying 'Publishers should not have to choose between protecting their copyrights and shunning the search-engine databases that map the Internet'.

And they don't have to choose. Google search results don't include very much of the content so a user has to click on the link to go to their site to see said content. They're free to do whatever they want to do to protect content on their site. They're free to do whatever they want to do to monetize said content.

When pushed, their complaints seem to be:

(1) when they implement protections, users go elsewhere

(2) They can't get enough ad revenue from their pages.

(3) Other folks "steal" their content and google will find said stolen content and help users find it. (In many cases, said other "copies" are completely legit. The sneer quotes are because they object when someone else reports the same news.)

(4) Google makes money online and we're not, and since we're providing content and Google is just telling folks how to find it, Google is clearly cheating somehow.

amalcon• 17 years ago

Yeah, I'm amazed by this.

The "If you don't like it, just opt out" policy is basically a polite way of saying "We will de-list you before paying for the privilege of pointing users your way." I don't see how anyone could argue that doing this would be outside Google's rights.

I'd be interested to see how long big papers like the NY Times, W. Post, et al, would react when measures like this were passed -- and people started getting their news from smaller, local papers instead, because that's where Google sends them.

alanthonyc• 17 years ago

You may think it's funny, and to a certain extent, I do to and for the same reasons. But, the kind of thinking exhibited by the writer is also dangerous in tharlt his writings could actually influence people in the wrong way. There have been plenty of stupid laws passed before, here and in other places.

swombat• 17 years ago

This reads like a bad joke!... To summarise, their proposal to "save the news industry" is to:

- make it illegal for search engines to index sites without asking for explicit permission from each and every site

- make it illegal for people to report on "hot news" that has been broken by one specific outlet first without paying that first outlet

- remove monopoly caps on news organisations, allowing them to become even bigger than news corp (as if that wasn't big enough already)

- give some tax breaks to the news industry and pay people to post ads in newspapers instead of craigslist

...

What world do the authors of this article live in? I sure hope it's not mine.

Tangurena2• 17 years ago

The authors of that article live in a world where companies like the RIAA who sue their customers are considered heroes.

njharman• 17 years ago

I'm not a journalist, but I am in the industry (developer for metro daily).

This is one of the more clueless and wrong headed set of ideas I've seen. I'd be preaching to the choir explaining why I believe that here. So, instead I'll make some important points that often seem to be forgotton.

Talking heads are not the newspaper industry. I don't believe the papers I'm involved with would agree with any of these ideas.

The AP is not the newspaper industry. Many papers despise what the AP is doing and are considering dumping them. (fear of that is causing the AP to freak out and do stupid shit)

National Big Name newspapers are not the newspaper industry. They get the attention cause they're big and have household names. But by far most papers, most circulation and most readership are small metro and community papers.

Newspapers are not the newspaper industry. There is a wide range of owners, ideas, and plans amongst newspapers. Some of the ideas are good some are bad. Some papers will shutdown, some will thrive, some will no longer be newspaper companies.

tm• 17 years ago

Good points all around. I've found developers at newspaper orgs often have better solutions to the problems in the industry then the 'media veterans' themselves.

Which paper do you work for? Would love to get in touch (alex at newscred dot com).

bobbyi• 17 years ago

If you have a better proposal on how to save journalism, I'd love to hear it.

I like the idea of helping news organizations convert into nonprofits much better than Eric Schmidt's suggestion that they abandon the journalism "product" and find a new one.

jgilliam• 17 years ago

Nationalize a few newspapers. A couple billion dollars a year would finance an incredible number of investigative journalists, and it would be far better for democracy than what we currently have -- dumbed down news designed to maximize viewership and ad sales.

ckinnan• 17 years ago

How exactly is state-controlled media good for democracy?

jimboyoungblood• 17 years ago

if you didn't notice, the authors are NOT journalists:

"Bruce W. Sanford and Bruce D. Brown are partners in the Washington office of Baker Hostetler. They specialize in media and First Amendment law."

obviously if congress were to pass these idiotic laws, this wouldn't translate to any more business for their law firm. noooooooo sir it wouldn't. they're just trying to defend journalism!

silentOpen• 17 years ago

"... the taking of entire Web pages by search engines, which is what powers their search functions, is not fair use but infringement."

Must... restrain... cluebat.

vaksel• 17 years ago

Surprise surprise, the authors are lawyers

nl• 17 years ago

I hope everyone here knows about the Overton Window (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window).

Viewed in that light this article isn't dumb, and the authors aren't stupid. They are re-framing the debate in terms of copyright law reform, public good and public policy rather than technical merit and economics.

Notice how the comments here are about how dumb their ideas are? That's what they want - for their ideas to be accepted as part of a valid debate.

Laws to Save Journalism (or The Most Unintentionally Funny Thing I've Read All Day)

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