"Secret" Meeting of News Execs and Lawyers a Joke

Although reports of newspaper execs holding a “secret meeting” to discuss how to charge for their online content were circulating here and there around the Web yesterday, there was, in fact, nothing particularly secret about what actually occurred.

Senior execs from most major U.S. newspaper companies, including Hearst, Gannett, Scripps, The New York Times, the Media NewsGroup, the AP and McClatchy did indeed meet under the auspices of the Newspaper Association of America in Chicago on Thursday to explore “Models to Lawfully Monetize Content.”

The AP reported the story.

A bunch of would-be saviors for the embattled industry, including some of the usual suspects, were on hand as well. Steven Brill and cronies got on the agenda to present their utterly redundant concept of building a new e-commerce platform called Journalism Online that would purportedly facilitate newspapers’ ability to charge for content online.

If newspapers go for Brill’s hustle, they deserve an early death — or, if you prefer, I’ll tell you what I really think. That is that it was incredibly stupid for the NAA to even allow the likes of Brill, Gordon Crovitz and Leo Hindery in the room in the first place!

Really, folks, these are the naked short sellers of the newspaper industry’s financial collapse. Once Journalism Online is consigned to the dustbin of digital history, expect them to pop back up with another original concept, say Cellphone Journalism.

Also presenting was another rather murky outfit called the Fair Syndication Consortium, which is said to include Politico, Reuters and Magazine Publishers of America. What has this hastily thrown-together consortium come up with so far?

Well, a Valley-based startup, Attributor, which presents itself as “the world’s premier web-wide content tracking and monetization platform. Customers such as The Associated Press, Deutsche Presse Agentur and CondéNet use Attributor to identify new sales leads and revenue-sharing opportunities, monitor licensed uses and derive more links and better search engine placement.”

Fair enough. If the newspapers won’t optimize their content for the web on their own, “seasoned entrepreneurs,” as the principals behind this outfit self-identify, will be happy to do it for them.

Nothing new here yet.

But let’s get back to one of the words in the title of Thursday’s gathering, “Models to Lawfully Monetize Content.” I got the feeling that some online wags found the presence of antitrust lawyers suitable to brew up conspiracy theories, as if all of these newspaper executives and their lawyers are cooking up a way to start charging en masse for their content as their lawyers and lobbyists convince concerned, if misguided, members of Congress like Nancy Pelosi to “relax” antitrust laws that would otherwise preclude said outcome.

I doubt it. Have you ever met one of the industry’s antitrust lawyers? Let me be blunt. If these companies truly want to figure out how to survive, they should hold their meeting in secret — from their lawyers! All these guys do is scare them every time they consider something bold.

Take Google. Does Google give over its product development to lawyers? No, of course not. It simply starts scanning millions of out of print books, to cite one salient example, and figures the laws will be interpreted as they may, sometime down the road, hopefully long after the algorithm has left the library.

(With the librarian, flushed and flustered, breathing after the closing door, “Oh, when will you be coming back to me, my sweet scanner?”)

Innovation never comes from the risk-averse crowd.

Oh the hell with it. Go ahead and just give the rest of your money to Brill, you dummies. Meanwhile, where the hell is Jon Stewart and The Daily Show when we really need them?

Credit to Emma Heald at editorsweblog.org for surfacing this story across the Atlantic.