Helluva a piece from a J-school student

[Simon_Cowbell]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rob-fishman/initiating-a-culture-of-c_b_167461.html

The Times needs to lead the way charging for (and legally protecting) its content.

 

[Pete Incaviglia]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rob-fishman/initiating-a-culture-of-c_b_167461.html

The Times needs to lead the way charging for (and legally protecting) its content.

It seems the call for paying for news online is growing. He's said what many of us have said time and again — only he said it very well.

I couldn't agree with him more.

The time is coming — it has to be — when everyone (readers, bloggers, aggregaters, et al) will pay for their news online.

 

[BB Bobcat]

Rob Fishman for President

 

[WaylonJennings]

I really, really, really wish The Times would take the plunge. Until they do, the industry is just kind of treading water. The Harvard analogy in the piece is apt.

 

[Montezuma's Revenge]

That is a hell of a piece.

 

[Fenian_Bastard]

Yeah, I particularly enjoyed the glib use of "ill-fated" while drawing a clumsy analogy to Make-A-Wish in the lede.

 

[Pete Incaviglia]

Yeah, I particularly enjoyed the glib use of "ill-fated" while drawing a clumsy analogy to Make-A-Wish in the lede.

For some reason, I never really took note of that. But on second thought, it's pretty bad.

However, the meat and potatoes after that lead is worth the read.

 

[Joe Williams]

Look at the big brain on Rob!

I do wonder if the NYT figures it is better off staying free while metro papers around the country die off, thereby growing the potential of its paying audience. If it goes behind a firewall now, papers in Chicago, L.A., Denver, etc., could try the same. But if it waits, it can grab readers whose local rags have sputtered into oblivion. Maybe it's a matter of who can outlast whom.

 

[Simon_Cowbell]

Yeah, I particularly enjoyed the glib use of "ill-fated" while drawing a clumsy analogy to Make-A-Wish in the lede.

Well, I needed SOME proof he is a college student.

 

[dooley_womack1]

Unless a way can be found to negate C and V, and negate "copy web page," keeping paid content from proliferating freely will be well nigh impossible.

 

[The Good Doctor]

Unless a way can be found to negate C and V, and negate "copy web page," keeping paid content from proliferating freely will be well nigh impossible.

There are sites that don't allow c+v, but his general point was to charge for third-party use. If someone takes the page and posts it elsewhere without compensation, then the Times just goes to the site (or parent company) and claims copyright infringement. No different than what movie and TV studios do on YouTube.

 

[dooley_womack1]

No company has the legal budget to go after the millions of bloggers and other such leeches, and certainly not the millions who would pass along compelling stories via e-mail.

 

[London Calling]

Fishman's piece is articulated well, but is it possible that newspapers have screwed themselves over too much because it's just too late to say to online readers, "Hey, I know we've been handing our product to you for free for a decade, but now it's time to start paying up"?

I mean, when/if that happens, online-only readers with the mindset "Why would I pay for paper when it's free online?" are going to go elsewhere for their news instead of paying up. And print subscribers probably enjoy a hard copy paper in their hands, which is probably why they still subscribe, so unless you cut out paper altogether (presumably to save money) and hope print readers crossover to the web, nothing changes. If anything, it could easily get worse, no?

Seems like a gamble, but maybe it's worth taking because the ship is sinking swiftly at this point.

 

[The Good Doctor]

No company has the legal budget to go after the millions of bloggers and other such leeches, and certainly not the millions who would pass along compelling stories via e-mail.

No, but it's not that difficult to go after the prominent ones. If Jim Joe Bob's blog wants to post a Times story, whatever. How many people are actually going to be able to find it?

RE: E-mail -- See the first sentence of my previous post.

 

[Simon_Cowbell]

No company has the legal budget to go after the millions of bloggers and other such leeches, and certainly not the millions who would pass along compelling stories via e-mail.

No, but it's not that difficult to go after the prominent ones. If Jim Joe Bob's blog wants to post a Times story, whatever. How many people are actually going to be able to find it?

RE: E-mail -- See the first sentence of my previous post.

If there are 10 guys about to attack one guy with a gun with only six bullets, they're still gonna think twice about attacking that guy.

 

[NoOneLikesUs]

RE: E-mail -- See the first sentence of my previous post.

Mere child's play to any dedicated hacker. Hell, they would probably make a Firefox extension for getting around the anti-copy and paste feature in a week.

 

[BB Bobcat]

What do you guys think of the music analogy?

Seems to me a few years back when everyone was passing around free mp3s it was supposed to be the death of the music industry.

 

[WaylonJennings]

What do you guys think of the music analogy?

Seems to me a few years back when everyone was passing around free mp3s it was supposed to be the death of the music industry.

Well, if you read Rolling Stone at all, you'd know it's still in a death spiral.

Also, I echo the "Who cares if Jim Joe Bob's Rockin' Yankees Blog" decides to copy and paste. Go after it on a case by case basis, I guess, but the main thing is choking off the Huffington Posts and Daily Kozes of the world that just mooch off our content (not to mention Google and Yahoo!). The biggies won't be able to do it, and that's who you're trying to kill, not Joe's Blog with 27 readers a day.

I was at a newspaper where we had to send a cease-and-desist lawyer letter to a fan site that was allowing readers to copy and paste our stories because "That rag doesn't deserve to get linked." I can promise you that our stuff was never copied and pasted again.

Don't listen to the doomsaying posters and reader commenters on the Huffington Post and elsewhere that scream about how newspapers could never charge for content because, "We'll all go elsewhere!" or "The NYT sucks balls anyway! Huffington Post rules, MSM drools!" They're scared ****less is what it comes down to. And **** them.

 

[Gomer]

Wasn't AP partnering with a service that searches for sites using copyrighted stories illegally so they could go after them?

Ah, here it is: http://blogs.zdnet.com/micro-markets/?p=1472

 

[schiezainc]

I like the analogy to the music industry.

Ten years ago, Napster was thought of as the death of sales for artists. Nowadays, it's all about iTunes.

Sure, the sales aren't what they used to be (For reasons I won't get into here but mainly the overpriced cost of a CD) but they're a hell of a lot better than they would have been without all of the RIAA's lawsuits.

Ten years from now, sure main papers won't be around. But the ones that are will have adapted to the changes in the business world. And right now, the change that needs to happen is described vividly in the above-linked piece.