Editor and Publisher: An idea to save newspapers.
Could Changes in Copyright Law be Newspapers’ Savior? Giving newspapers a 24 hour ‘exclusive’ period to take advantage of their own newsgathering (and ad-gathering). “‘You have all these free riders like Daily Beast and Newser and local television stations aggregating your stories online while diverting readers and advertisers from your site,’ David Marburger told Schultz. ‘And they’re doing it for a fraction of the cost of the newspapers that generated the original copy. And it hit me: All those theories out there on how to prop up newspapers - why isn’t anyone saying this?’”
Comments:
Still great swaths of America that don’t get their news from the internet, J. News has to be in a form that the majority can parse.
Sigh. I guess one retort would be “Yeah, well those vast swaths [insert: speciously concocted negative-outcome outlier], so I think that makes my case for me!”
I completely empathize with the near impossibility of providing meaningful news in an understandable format to the broadest possible audience. But taken as an institution, it’s failed/ing miserably. Newspapers don’t deserve to be saved any more than banks deserve to be bailed out: it’s little more than faith-based inertia feeding this behavior, IMHO.
But maybe I’m the outlier in this case - maybe my lack of faith is my own, and perhaps its misplaced. For me, ‘news’ is not so much a singular account of an event; instead, it’s a conglomeration of various narratives, memory, and Googlepedia. I don’t know if I’m common in this respect or not. Maybe the combination of my free time and intervention-requiring usage of Google Reader make me the outlier here….
I’m a leftover, I suppose. It isn’t authoritative or real unless it’s in black and white, on paper.
I say that, though I haven’t opened a newspaper in months, and I actively avoid television news, television news-comedy ... etc. etc.
The only problem with the plan is this: if a lot of those views to the online newspaper are coming from the news aggregators, how much would the traffic to those sites drop if the aggregators could no longer link to them? Yes, the argument is for 24 hrs, and then they could link, but can you imagine how complicated the system would be for that? You’d have to come up with a new standard to distinguish 24 hr news from older news (something like a XML file or an HTML tag or something), and the more desparate the newspapers get, the more complicated that scheme would become.
How often do you visit a newspaper’s website directly to read the news vs. following a link from an aggregator? In my case, it’s almost always (99.99%) the latter (and then, I often click on the ad links on the newspaper’s site). Even for well known sites like WSJ, Wash Post and NYTimes, how much traffic would they lose if aggregators couldn’t link to them.
There are some very interesting solutions being proposed to solve the monetization problem (giving out ebook readers, paywalls, etc.), this just isn’t one of them.
Suffice it to say the “Eureka” solution isn’t here yet?
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Not. Gonna. Happen.
News, by its very definition, is non-exclusive.
He’s still attached to the “Newspapers are too important to die” philosophy. He literally cannot imagine a world in which a cultural hierarchy determines the daily news stories - those days are gone. Blogger/Twitter, etc, are the new info distribution platforms.
Journos are just now beginning to absorb the seriousness of their predicament, and only a few have seen the light and struck out solo. Most I encounter are barely aware of the system that supports them, and many are tacitly dishonest about what that system demands of them.
Goodbye, newspapers. And good riddance.