I wish the discussions of the future could be had without the hysteria.
Jeff Jarvis went all drama queen after the New York Times did a story about the AP trying to find a legal way to regain control of their content.
Thing is, this IS the discussion of the future. And the notion of AP or anyone else expecting to get paid by people who link to their content is as dead stupid As Jeff Jarvis screaming about the old white men of Traditional Media. It is not a one or the other conversation and surely, nothing like that can ever be a solution.
There are two kinds of aggregators in the game... those who just link and might comment and those who steal significant chunks of content, making a click-thru an unlikely choice for a large portion of their readership.
I would say that, as Jarvis notes, the first group is responsible for the survival of the AP and pretty much all the news organizations that will survive and thrive in the web era. Drudge, for instance, is the King of the Aggregators and can deliver page views in the hundreds of thousands for many of the stories to which he links. And, in fact, the creation of Breitbart.com to funnel wire service links to a controlled site that can produce more revenue from those links was not only very smart, but, as I assume Breitbart pays AP for their content, it makes sense for them as well.
The other side of it is sites that use other people's content to not only fill the giant holes in the coverage they claim to offer, but take large chunks of content, stuck on branded and (theoretically) ad-sold pages, sometimes multiple internal pages, knowing full well that only a small percentage of readers go past the first few graphs anymore online. So they grab with a heavy headline, create a another page view or two by copying the content (and another when people click back to the homepage where they found the initial link), and more often than not, never send eyeballs to the organization paying for the wire service in the first place.
I consider this stealing... even if Jeff Jarvis thinks its old thinking. Linking = good. Reprinting content for free with no consideration = bad. Just like all piracy.
This doesn't make the failure of Old Media to convert to New Media any less real. But it is a different argument.
There is another category of what AP is chasing (along with other content creators), which is control of Google placement. And that is a more complex issue. If AP and/or Reuters and/or TribCo and/or NYT and/or WashPo, etc, have easy and clear access to their stories with one site as the source, do they deserve to be the link people use and Google puts on top? It is my philosophy that, yes, they do. We have always tried to work our way back to the source when linking at MCN. For years, the wire services have not had home pages and we have chosen between hundreds of wire service subscribing websites for links. Drudge used to link most AP stories through the Washington Post web pages until Breitbart.com. At MCN, we spread it around. But if AP wants the link to their story and I can find it and it is the complete story, hell yeah, happy to offer readers the source.
The lesson of a closed web has already been learned. It doesn't work. If you close your content off, someone else will run a similar story and you will get fewer and fewer links. Almost nothing, in this age, is actually exclusive in any way for more than a few minutes. There are stories that don't actually get re-reported, but just re-printed in some form or the other. I have no use for that. But think about what happens on most industry stories when they break. There are, usually, at least four or five outlets that have already done some reporting on the story. That is the speed nightmare... everyone is on it... who is going to break it, even if it isn't really news yet.
Even the legendary NYT wrote a story just a day or two ago in which they ascribed - with zero way of knowing the truth - a "most people found out" status twice, not based on any objective facts, but clearly on the personal experience of the authors of the story... a detail that used to be (and still should be) irrelevant in journalism.
Anyway...
Jarvis sounds like a buffoon when he bloviates: "You lost an entire generation. You lost the future of news."
Both sides of the argument need to start realizing… nothing, but printed content being sold daily in the quantity of hundreds of thousands of full-price-paying customers loaded with full-price-paying ad buyers, is lost forever… nothing is over… standards will change… some things will be better… some things will be worse…
Everything in life is not a fucking trend story. Please step away from the hysteria.
Read the complete post at http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/archives/2009/04/baby_the_sky_mu.html