Things to think about during lunch! Here is a comment on a New York magazine Daily Intel blog post: "A writer at the NYTimes, Post (NY or Huffington), etc. researches and writes an article over X days/weeks/months. NYMag then takes the story and rebrands it as Daily Intel with (maybe) a link to the original source. Is the link considered payment for the source material? If so, is this journalism's method of leveraging valuable content?"
Thursday, April 23, 2009
20
Also, does the Butterfinger Buzz contain enough caffeine that it could actually burn off all its calories by speeding my heart up to unhealthy levels? God, I hope so.... I've had like 7 already.
This has pretty much been the history of newspapers. One paper writes something, a bunch of others rewrite it. Pre-Civil War, the Postal Service started a newspaper sharing thing, so all newspapers were mailed for free to all other newspapers. Typesetters (like Samuel Clemens) then took whatever they needed from the other papers to fill space, and usually gave credit to the original paper, but not always.
Only in the monopoly newspaper/Associated Press brief era of total information control (1960-1995?) did people try to strictly control ownership of something as fleeting as news. So, fuck those people, for complaining about a NYMag blog post.
I suspect that it was Choire that commented on the NYMag post so he could leverage the NYMag post into this post and thereby make this post "deliciously meta".
Now my head hurts and the NY Times is no closer to getting a micro payment for all the work they've done.
I always wanted to start a rag and call it Published Reports, so that everybody would always constantly every day be citing me without knowing it.
lost me at 'huffington post writer researches an article.'
Yes well there IS that.
We'd sure as shit cut down on the ridiculous amount of information if anyone had to pay for it.
There's your answer - threaten to release streams of free information if people don't pay you NOT to write.
One reason why this statement is invalid: the chance of an article being reblogged is inversely correlated to the amount of time spent preparing it. You know those stories that the Times writes as Pulitzer bait? Those never end up being frothily debated online. You know what DOES get huge attention? Something Maureen Dowd wrote while taking a shit.
thanks for that mental image
This is going to be a major legal sticking point in the new world of Web 3.0.
If the first wave of the internet was "information wants to be free" and entailed vast pools of information being readily available to the public, thereby destroying the business model of innumerable middle-men,
and if the second wave of the internet was interactivity, creating user-generated content (e.g., Doree's book written by other people),
then the third wave will be when the intellectual property lawyers really get fired up about defending copyright. The doctrine of "fair use" provides that you can ripoff another writer if you only excerpt part of their work and provide credit and a citation to their original work. (in the interwebs, a link is also good manners, except if you're linking to politico, cuz, ya know, they suck).
I think we'll see this doctrine of "fair use" modified to restrict the activities of media aggregators like HuffPo, Gawker and, yes, our dear Awl. Content isn't free, it's property and you can't just use it as you please.
Well, on your last point, just as there was in DMCA, there's CERTAINLY a difference between quoting a sentence--that's free to do in any medium!--and reproducing something in its entirety. We're certainly not slapping up five paragraphs of someone's story over here.
I don't think we should even slap up more than five paragraphs of our OWN stories.
God, it's like you're building my dream business with me!
All I know is that they both get to the train station at the same time.
It depends. Are my adverts PPI or PPC?
PCP actually... + Electrolytes!
I'm confused. Taking something from Huffington Post is bad form â€" cuz why?
They pay their contributors? They don't " fair use" stuff ad infinitum?
Someone above has it rightâ€" the lawyers are coming, the lawyers are coming...
The link is the footnote of the new millenium.
i just came up with the answer to newspaper crisis over an afternoon nap: plastics! er, sorry. meant: royalties! information might be fleeting but that's the only asset newspapers have to leverage. if huffington post or nbc news wants to inform their readers/viewers about the Times' NSA probe story, and the exclusive information contained therein, then maybe they should pay for the right to repeat that information. otherwise, send they should send their own damn reporters to ask questions at the nsa. if they don't, then they don't cover that bit of news. (this solution only works on the assumption that people want to read) (it does not work for thursday styles stories about shorts, although god knows they've tried to monopolize that story)