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The death of Tim Russert has got me thinking about the huge role the news media plays in my life. I love journalism (which is not punditry. Punditry leads to things like sexism against Hillary Clinton or smearing Michelle Obama while wearing a placid smile and a lot of TV makeup). I rely on journalists every day and I'm very grateful to newspaper reporters in particular who work long hours on often tedious assignments so I can read finished stories and often, blog about them. This is why bloggers' AP boycott pisses me off. I’m not a journalist, but I benefit from journalists' work. Many bloggers are journalists, do original reporting, and their work should stand on its own. Mine often does not, and so I feel the relevance of the Associated Press' copyright dispute.
Professor Kim Pearson, who is a real journalist and a scholar, got me thinking when she wrote an excellent post about the AP's newly announced intention to create new policies for fair use of its content by non-members (people who don't pay in to the AP collective). Bloggers have begun to boycott the AP, started a website called unassociatedpress.net, and are raising a big stink. At issue is the definition of fair use of the AP's content, which many of the nation's top news organizations pay for, but which is available widely to anyone. The AP also is responsible for providing election results for primaries and general elections. Kim writes:
One of the ironies of this entire dispute is that AP is a cooperative that
pools and shares content by members, in addition to the content it
generates for its subscribers. In other words, even though it was
created when the telegraph was the high-tech means of news
distribution, it functions in ways that are analogous
to sites such as Drudge Retort and even group blog sites such as
BlogHer. Not only that, but in the 19th century, the AP fought it's own
version of the net neutrality battle -- it had to fight Western Union
for the right to have its own telegraph wires. Now, as AP sees its
business model threatened by the rise of social media, it is flailing
to find ways of ensuring its survival.
Indeed. The AP does not want bloggers excerpting large chunks of its content. The AP's initial decision to curtail the Drudge Retort's usage concerned excerpts of 39-79 words. How many times have you, as a blogger, excerpted more than 79 words? Here's what that looks like:
And he said that he still believes that it is more appropriate for blogs to use short summaries of A.P. articles rather than direct quotations, even short ones.
“Cutting and pasting a lot of content into a blog is not what we want to see,” he said. “It is more consistent with the spirit of the Internet to link to content so people can read the whole thing in context.”
Even if The A.P. sets standards, bloggers could choose to use more content...
That's 83 words, lifted right off the NewYorkTimes.com. Now, I linked back to the site and gave it credit, but is that enough? I’m not chipping in to pay the reporter’s salary! One of the AP's concerns is that bloggers' excessive use of content dampens the finances of the copyright holder, in this case, the AP. Certainly, any of us who earn revenue from blogging should be mindful that when we riff off content another reporter's created, we're in essence being paid for someone else's dirty work. I don't know about you, but this is one of the things that really gives me pause as a blogger who rarely does original reporting. It doesn't seem fair to me that I get to opine, sometimes get positive feedback, sometimes even appear on TV, when someone else is doing the real work of reporting. This is a real question for bloggers. Some term it "remix culture," the essence of a media mix where everything is cross-platform, driven by eyeballs, and the professional boundaries of journalism mean less than the ability to put the right spin on a phrase. This seems to me fundamentally unfair. What I remix is the fruit of someone's hard labor. And if they work at the AP, they don't earn a lot of money, most likely. On the other hand, this is the oldest story in the book. American journalism, like a lot of blogging, started out
