In an article for Yahoo News recently, News Does Not Want to be Free, cartoonist and writer Ted Rall, a previous finalist for the Pulitzer prize, recommends three solutions to rescue a desperate American print newspaper industry. The first two are that newspapers should only be available offline, and that every story should be copyrighted to prevent reporting of the same story in other media. A number of commentators, particularly Mike Resnick in Techdirt pointed out that Rall is being (to put it politely) less than realistic. One implication of Rall's modest proposal is that as soon as any newspaper across the planet reports any story, they effectively own the facts! The guy is clearly a little delusional. The question is why he was published, and why he is so desperate.

But before looking at this, I'll try to be fair, and quote an argument in favour of the print media that Rall makes rather coherently:

Newsgathering requires extensive infrastructure. Beat reporters, freelancers, editors, stringers, fact-checkers, and travel cost a lot of money. (A week in rural Afghanistan costs at least $10,000.) Why shouldn't newspapers--the main newsgathering organizations in the United States--be compensated for those expenses?

What Rall doesn't say is that newspapers also get a lot of news from blogs. Moreover, blogs do have a lot of infrastructure -- the web, the readership and the comment system. These in fact largely do the job of the editor and the fact checkers. There are also people in all kinds of “hotspots”, for examples soldiers, policemen, translators, and officials, who may not currently be allowed to blog, but for whom a way will be found. Nor does Rall really explain why online media businesses cannot support enough infrastructure to do a good job. The article is, after all, written for Yahoo News.

I think Rall is desperate because the change is well underway and, like other print journalists, he now sees that it is inevitable and rather threatening, and so can do little else but plead for special protection. But rather than again going into the merits of the change and the future of print vs online newspaper vs blog, I would like just to pick out a couple of results that are emerging from this change.

The first is influence. Although most people as much on radio and newspaper as TV at their news, newspapers carry a lot of weight. If they are now part of a news mesh that includes the whole range of online media, these media are now real players in social and political as well as business thinking. I think that Obama's campaign shows that, at least in the US, this has now effectively happened.

The second is the implication that information in all spheres of life – not just technical, selling or entertainment – is going to become increasingly interactive, as feeds, aggregation, commenting, sharing, mashups and even microblogging become standard patterns of communication. Not in a matter of months, perhaps, but fast enough that step changes can be better measured in months than years. The winners from this change will be those that keep in step!

The mystery behind the media bloggers association that defended Rogers Cadenhead of The Drudge Retort to AP is clearing. But if anything it shows AP in an even worse light than before. Wanting to be sure I had not overlooked something when writing yesterday about them, I visited the Media Bloggers Association site. Three things were quickly apparent, and explain why I'm not posting a link to the site.

1. The site offers legal advice to bloggers that join, but the proprietor says he is not a lawyer, and in various posts he ridicules those who say he claims to represent bloggers as a whole. Mmmm, very strange.

2. Roger Cox, the proprietor, does not come across like a blogger. In responding to Gawker's piece about him he expressed a level of rudeness and arrogance you rarely see in the blogosphere. But, on the other hand, Gawker's piece, "Is the Media Bloggers Association a Scam?" had done a pretty good exposé on him! He also does not do the usual thing of citing and linking in a friendly way to other blogs, but seems to only talk about himself. And though he mentions how other blogs talk about him, he does not often link to the stories. I was pretty amazed why this would make any blogger want him as their representative.

3. His sympathies appear to be all with the traditional news media. He says nicer things about AP than about other blogs.

In fact, Making Light has taken a pretty close look at Cox's background and turned up some rather unpleasant facts, including Cox doctoring his wikipedia entry by claiming credit for someone else's story, being behind right-wing sites attacking every liberal blog in election campaigns, spamming blogs that give him negative coverage, and, worst of all, having existing business links to AP...

In a way, I ended up almost respecting Cox's chutzpah, except that I think it looks more like bullying - or joining the bullies in this case. The many news outlets taking the AP / Media Bloggers Association negotiation at face value are starting to look out of their depth as this story refuses to die. AP certainly seems to be trying to kill it, and leaving the Drudge Retort well alone, but I have the feeling there is more to come...

AP has found itself the subject of a lot of online criticism in the last few days after serving a cease and desist notice against Drudge Retort - for using quotations from A.P. articles ranging from 39 to 79 words. The Drudge Retort is a liberal, left-wing alternative to the Drudge Report that famouslycreated its own firestorm by publishing, at the Clinton camp's suggestion, pictures of Barack Obama wearing tribal regalia in Somalia to undermine his homeland credentials.

Traditional newswire services like AP have a long history of enforcing protection against being copied by other newspapers without receiving a fee or an acknowledgment, as Bernhard Warner, an ex-newswire journalist reports sympathetically in the Times Online. But the troubling part of the AP’s logic is that, as Warner suggests:

bloggers aren’t the enemy. They have the power to help the wires win this credibility battle. A referral from an influential blogger can be a traffic bonanza for a news wire and its news clients. And, more importantly, a few well-crafted words from a blogger can succeed in elevating the brand name of AP or Reuters (or now Thomson Reuters) into the everyday news discussion that happens on vibrant news forums such as Drudge Retort. The mainstream press would never allow the news wire to get top billing.

But the legal department, always looking for a way of protecting copyright , may have thought they saw a good chance here. This time, though, AP have not just been caught picking on the small guy, which makes them look mean, but they have been found out for exagerating their own news, and going against their own fair use guidelines.

1. Exaggeration
The Drudge Retort has, understandably, tried to respond by arranging talks with AP through a previously little known group the Media Bloggers Association. AP is representing this as genuine dialog and a chance to draw up guidelines for "fair use" for bloggers everywhere but as no-one seems to know who this group is, as Mike Masnic of TechDirt points out, this is a bit exaggerated.

2. Breaking their own guidelines.
The main problem, though, is that AP now has no credibility left with bloggers, as it doesn't practice what it preaches, as the organization itself lifts big chunks from blogs without paying a cent for them, as this story from just last week shows.

Arrogance against blogs doesn't work, because blogs operate in a meritocracy. They get read by publishing interesting pieces on subjects people want to read about. Where that differs from journalism is not that clear to me. Journalists earn more but have less freedom, but that's hardly a useful distinction. Journalists face issues of copyright and defamation, which their editors and lawyers are quick to point out. But blog etiquette - and instant responses to blogs that break it - do a pretty good job here, too. Sure, there are poor blogs, but there is also poor journalism. And there are ways to respond to poor blogging practices.

Getting the legal department involved is like calling the the police when a kid eats an apple off your tree - they'll probably end up breaking your window, too, next time. Blogs are here to stay, and they are generally friendly. Moral of this story is, once again: If you are nice they will pay you back with interest; if you are tough, they will pay you back with interest.

Big Payday for Web 2.0 is an interesting blog from Wired
about this week's Web 2.0 deals - as CBS bought CNET for $1.8 billion and Ask.com (owned by IAC) bought Lexico, parent company of Dictionary.com, for a reported $100 million, to name a couple of the deals. The blog suggests weak IPOs at the beginning of the year for Classmates.com, for example, may have pushed companies towards sales exits rather than IPOs.

The surprise is that both buyers and sellers are in place. The need for strong online news and search remains strong, of course, and it's not just about Yahoo and Google.

But is CBS buying at the right time or price, or is it a sign of an old media company getting nervous? My personal opinion is that it's better for old media companies to grow their own brand online, but CBS may feel they are a bit late in the game. A few commentators think this is a smart move, but most - particularly Douglas McIntyre at 24/7 WallStreet - seem to think it is one company that is going nowhere buying another company that is going nowhere.

I don't know how many comments I've read on this in the last few days. Obviously, a theme in the news, but I think for a reason - people are realising that this is moving faster than we thought.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports the German National Blogger Conference re:publica panel seeing the transition from paper to web in terms of five to ten years. Not so much breaking news stories so much as the discussions, essays and features. Personally, for these, I am already torn between web and print journalism. Report and reaction can be quickly browsed and compared online, but for me there is also the comfort factor, and the surprise factor, in newspapers - i.e. a in-depth reporting of something I had not thought about before. In online journalism I tend to follow what I am looking for instead. But I expect that, too, will change!

I suspect that the blogger panel is not far wrong. Here in Switzerland we had a daily free tabloid, 20 minutes - which many locals call "20 seconds" - that you pick up while you wait for your train station. It's pretty sensationalist fare, with front pages regularly led by surveys comparing the sexual habits of various European countries, or by Hollywood gossip or its local equivalents. But now it has no fewer than four rivals, going downmarket, highbrow, business or radical, as you wish. These rivals are produced by the major newspaper publishers here, and are probably soon to be the future replacement for the weekday newspaper - instant news and comment with pictures, localised advertising and lightweight features. It is easy to imagine a date not far away when most people will look online for all the in-depth coverage. After all, the blogosphere is is still only a handful of years old.

Meanwhile, this week the New York Times ran what some saw as an unbalanced story by Matt Richtel about blogging's health hazards (staying up all night to keep pace with the blogosphere). The fact that it was rather sensationalist shows again that a lot of print journalism that hasn't quite grasped the wake up call from blog journalists. The blogosphere may be, in a sense, virtual, but for newspapers it is also the new reality.

Jennifer Saba's article in Editor and Publisher from a couple of days ago, NAA Reveals Biggest Ad Revenue Plunge in More Than 50 Years presents interesting figures:


The newspaper industry (in the US) has experienced the worst drop in advertising revenue in more than 50 years. According to new data released by the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 -- the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950...There are signs that online revenue is beginning to slow as well.

source: Newspaper Association of America 2008

This just confirms again not only the advertising power of the web, but its importance as a news medium. There was a similar decline in 2001, the first in many years, but I think this time the slide is likely to continue, partly because so much of the news on the primary elections has been generated online. We can expect print news to become less and less influential.

So what impact will this trend have on the news itself? I would say at the moment things are fairly evenly balanced between the press and the web. For one thing, newspapers have the resources - and the legal responsibility - to be accurate (and now have hte blogosphere to hold them to account if they mess up). They are also under pressure to offer comprehensive coverage. Bloggers, on the other hand, are free from the pressure to represent a news organization's agenda, and can call it just as they see it.

When the mass readership and the median sources of news both come more online, big news corporations will turn more resources to the web than they do now, get much smarter at using blogs and SEO, and diversify their activities, getting more into entertainment and social network services. They will need to do this to survive. But newspaper proprietors are generally not just in it for the money, but for political influence, so presumably that is going to be played out on line, and not just in the online versions of the papers but in the blogosphere and social web. That will be a challenge for the independent and critical ethos of the web.

I am optimistic that that the web will remain an excellent news medium, but I think we are in for some interesting times.