Posner Advises Press to Commit Business Suicide

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  1

  ErikSherman

  06/29/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Posner Advises Press to Commit Business Suicide

  David,
  
  I think you got his post wrong. I don't think he was suggesting that as a good idea. I think he's saying that it's the type of eventuality that could come about if those producing news can't get adequately compensated for their work, unless you want the source of news to dwindle down to a couple of wire services. Yes, there are online sites that break news, there are non-profit groups funding investigative pieces, but you need a certain amount of collected capital to fund the heavy work of quotidian journalism, and online ad rates simply don't get there. I took this not as prescription so much as sad prediction.

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  2

  hotweir

  06/29/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Posner Advises Press to Commit Business Suicide

  I guess you can read it that way. He did indeed sound mournful in tone and doubtful that newspapers will survive whatever they do. It's just such a ludicrous idea to even discuss because the entire idea of the Internet revolves around sharing. I'm also influenced by Larry Lessig"s "The Future of Ideas," and his argument that this kind of IP-based intervention by lawyers and judges is ruining the Web as a source of creativity both in content and in commerce. So, while I see your point, I hold to mine.

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  3

  ErikSherman

  06/29/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Posner Advises Press to Commit Business Suicide

  I understand what you're saying. At the same time, I'd suggest that sharing without providing to cover the cost of those who create what is shared is equally ludicrous. Now figure for a moment that politicians for various reasons don't want to provide monetary bailouts to media. Internet giants continue to make use of media without paying those who create it. Either one of two things happens: a) most media companies go under, leaving most of the Internet with virtually no source of information, or b) we see the power of letting things develop as they will. Would Congress pass a copyright change? Maybe; they've done it before. But I can imagine a number of other scenarios equally as scary, if not more so. Can you imagine news sponsored by the individuals and companies covered? How about open sourcing without verification of what's coming in?

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  TheNudger

  06/29/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Posner Advises Press to Commit Business Suicide

  David - I see how you could interpret Posner's article as you did. But if you take in in the context of his perspective as a judge AND as an expert in cost/benefit analysis (check out his book "Catastrophe") it makes some sense.
  Right now, if we all explicitly followed the terms of service/use our lawyers created for us, we simply couldn't do most all the linking that we do now. It's the Web's version of "don't ask don't tell".
  What Posner is proposing, I think, it to bring it all into the legal light and ajudicate based on mutually agreed costs and benefits. Very consistent with the way he's approached many other contentious issues.
  Nick DiGiacomo

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  hotweir

  06/29/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Posner Advises Press to Commit Business Suicide

  Thanks to your thoughtful comments, Eric and Nick, I am officially trying to re-evaluate Posner's comments in a different light.
  
  Like him, I would love to protect those who try to create original content from harm's way. So if that is what he is trying to accomplish, I will write a new post in support of his approach.
  
  Some of this, for me, is really about why I (and others) write to begin with. I don't get paid very much to create original content and I never have, with precious few exceptions.
  
  But it is also true that making money has never been my main objective. I write here & elsewhere because I have to -- that is who I am. Surviving as a a writer, most of the time, is to manage a number of contradictory states:
  
  * In my experience, your boss usually hates or devalues you -- whoever is the editor or publisher in any given venue, i.e., the man, never has a good word to say about your work. All he says is some version of the old refrain "you are not doing what I told you to do."
  
  * Whenever you do something truly original, and important for our larger culture, you pay a personal price. It may be death threats, it may be getting fired, it may be having your friends and family turning on you, but whatever it is, it never feels good.
  
  * It is only the rare person who shows up and provides the support you need to keep going. That person is usually a fellow writer, ie.e, a fellow traveler without power or money.
  
  If Posner cares about what it is like to be an original content creator, and has a plan to make our lives less vulnerable than they are, I will join his camp ASAP. But from where I sit, if I couldn't benefit from those kind enough to link to this modest little blog, I would be dead in the water.
  
  Comments?

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  6

  TheNudger

  06/30/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Posner Advises Press to Commit Business Suicide

  Posner is, I think, less concerned about particular issues than he is about the process - i.e. whenever he sees a situation where cost/benefit analysis can be employed to make decisions (particularly on a societal scale), he jumps in. So I don't think he has any sympathy for creative types, newspapers, bloggers, etc. per se - he just sees a lack of sensible process.
  Because of this, he is a very polarizing figure. He has looked a global warming, for example, and suggested that money is better spent on real immediate suffering than indeterminate future pain. And his way of putting a price on everything (e.g. human life) infuriates people who viscerally can't do that.
  But cost/benefit is something that is sorely missing in the media business. As you eloquently express, most creators are (emotionally and financially) underappreciated. This is in no small part due to the lack of an accepted "value equation" for all the pieces - new and old. So it's more likely that entrenched players take heavy-handed steps (threats to block links or the Digital Millenium Act). This (along with the investor-driven creative destruction mantra) forces new players to try and destroy entrenched players instead of working with them.
  
  Nick

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  hotweir

  06/30/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Posner Advises Press to Commit Business Suicide

  Yes, it's hard for anybody to switch POVs on these issues. Now you have outlined the cost/benefit approach, I am reminded that when I am the editor with P and L responsibility, I'm immediately shocked with how expensive content creation can be. Original work, even at devalued rates, really swells the budget. That's why aggregating content is so much more attractive, even to me. Media companies face a dilemma in that to contain costs and create an opportunity to make money, they need to collect cheap or free content. But those with real talent to create that talent need to be compensated -- not necessarily because their main goal is to make money but because they need to survive while doing that creative work.
  
  I'm still against any idea of copyright expansion, however. I'd rather see better business models spinning out more revenue shared with creators.
  
  Meanwhile, I hope all is well with you and Vanno!

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  Oldster

  06/30/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Posner Advises Press to Commit Business Suicide

  "the entire idea of the Internet revolves around sharing."
  
  Well, sort of, but certainly not in the way it is being done now and certainly not for individual or commercial profit.
  The original sharing was mainly between academics and scientists. Tim Berners-Lee's development of what became the world wide web was mainly to facilitate sharing of information by making it simple for people who weren't computer scientists and engineers to use the internet.
  
  But the notion of taking someone elses work and using it for personal or commercial benefit or profit without permission, credit or compensation was not acceptable then and shouldn't be acceptable now. Just because you want something doesn't mean you are free to take it. The consequences of doing that in the physical world are profound.
  
  But somehow the ease of doing that online has provided people with the idea that it should be OK to do it and wholly without consequence. Sorry, to my thinking it shouldn't be and I think Judge Posner would agree.
  
  

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  hotweir

  06/30/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Posner Advises Press to Commit Business Suicide

  I, for one, have never advocated the free "taking" of content. As a writer that would not be a position I could support. All this is about is linking. How linking equates to taking content escapes me. Linking results in many more people finding your work than any previous tool.
  
  Without links, content sits within a walled garden, especially if also behind a paywall. The reality is that that is a prescription for disaster; thus the title of my post.

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  Oldster

  06/30/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Posner Advises Press to Commit Business Suicide

  
  No disagreement on linking. The Google News approach of headline/source/topic sentence works as long as the source does not object. But if you want to read more you must go to the source and that benefits the source.
  
  But paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright owner's permission, that is another matter. If you want to cite the source (with link) and comment on it, that is one thing.
  
  But summarizing/paraphrasing the original (even with a link) to the point where the reader no longer needs to read the original to understand the basic content, that is another matter entirely. I think that is the bigger problem and unfortunately that approach to "creating content" seems to be increasing.

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  hotweir

  06/30/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Posner Advises Press to Commit Business Suicide

  Yes you and I are in agreement here, Oldster. There may be, as you suggest, a tendency toward "summary creep" going on out there. If so, I am opposed to it. The Google News model is a great one for those of us who create content. They advertise our work and drive us traffic. If we figure out SEO and other tricks of the trade, we can maximize this opportunity to build our businesses and our brands.
  
  Long excerpts, however, more resemble plagiarism.

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  12

  ErikSherman

  07/02/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Posner Advises Press to Commit Business Suicide

  >> How linking equates to taking content escapes me. Linking results in many more people finding your work than any previous tool. <<
  
  The problem is that linking doesn't work the way many people assume. From my own experience and some research, I feel comfortable in saying that click-through rates are generally in the lowest single digit percentages, and sometimes not that high. The more information you summarize, the less likely it is that people click through because they feel that they don't have to. That is because they feel that someone else has provided the value.
  
  This gets even worse when the perceived value for the content is low: i.e., most readers are satisfied with a headline and a lede. How many stories do you find where you want to read detail beyond that? When an aggregator like Google provides that much, it has pulled out the commercial value by reducing much audience curiosity to nothing.

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  13

  Medialifer

  07/02/09 | Report as spam

  Linking is not the problem

  The problem is that there is no cost to find out more
  information, and no limit to what you can enjoy without
  paying for it. Let me draw a sports analogy. I'm a huge
  baseball fan. Like most fans, I enjoy ESPN Baseball
  Tonight, where I can watch highlights of many different
  games encapsulated into a 15 to 30 second recap. I'll see
  two home runs, a strikeout, and a great infield play. That's
  it. If I wanted to see all these games in full, or decide for
  myself which highlights to watch, I'd have to subscribe to
  the MLB subscription, which is $199 per season. The
  problem for newspapers and news gathering operations is
  that the "fan" can see the whole game without the
  subscription. The mistake papers and other media sources
  make is not linking to stories, but including the "whole"
  story in the link. Smart newspapers would turn their
  electronic content to an "executive summary" of events (a
  15-30 second clip equivalent) and if the reader/user was
  interested in the "whole" they could then either micro-
  purchase that specific content, if the option is available, or
  buy a subscription to the paper (electronic or print).
  
  The idea that Posner raises may not sound on its face. One
  would hope that people materially affected by this broken
  model would help themselves (capitalism). But to an
  extent, it may be a scenario where only some "guiding
  hand" from government can fix this mess. The problem is
  so vast and affects so many, and those affects are so
  limited in what they can collectively do because of anti-trust
  laws, that short of a comprehensive "game-changing" move
  to protect news gatherers' right to be paid for their effort,
  everyone will continue to do what we're doing now,
  ruminate on the sidelines while Rome keeps burning.

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  14

  hotweir

  07/02/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Posner Advises Press to Commit Business Suicide

  Hmmm. My last comment is not showing up for some reason so I will try again.
  
  The kinds of links I am defending are search engine links, like Google's. These drive a ton of traffic to news sites.
  
  I cannot defend abstracts and summaries that dis-incentivize readers from going to the origonal.
  
  As a blogger, when I layer content on someone else's blog or article, I try to give enough of my own perspective to add value but leave enough of the original untouched in order to promote my colleague's work.
  
  That is how I navigate this tricky question of IP and links. I'm interested in the ways others try to handle these dicey issues.

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  ErikSherman

  07/03/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Posner Advises Press to Commit Business Suicide

  >> The kinds of links I am defending are search engine links, like Google's. These drive a ton of traffic to news sites. <<
  
  The question is how much traffic is actually diverted. I'd argue that most people are satisfied with a headline and maybe the first sentence in a story. I know Google is responsible for many visitors to news sites, but what percentage of Google users go to any site for a given story? I suspect it's pretty small, in which case the time value of news for most people is provided by Google and they want nothing else. Now, you could argue that news organizations need to offer more value, but that only works if people want it. And if they don't, then the news organizations don't get most of the traffic, even if they undergo the same expenses to even provide the head and lead (or hed and lede for those of you in the business). I don't mean for this to read as "poor old media," but it's a tough economic and business issue, and talking about traffic and online ads, which pay diddly, doesn't adequately address it.

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  hotweir

  07/03/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Posner Advises Press to Commit Business Suicide

  I'd be interested is learning the traffic patterns at Google News; maybe I'll try to dig into that. You are probably right, Erik, that most people just read headlines and abstracts, but I'm not sure that those people would *ever* go to the news source anyway. They are different slices of the audience.
  
  I liked the ESPN analogy back a couple comments ago, although I believe that it says more about the user than the content "creator," in this case a baseball team. Many people may prefer the highlights show, including Tal, and that's cool. By contrast, I'm not interested in highlights. I like the real thing, so I attend or watch or listen to one baseball game at a time in its entirety with much more pleasure than surfing through multiple highlights of multiple games.
  
  The point is people enjoy content in many different ways, and content providers need to understand this. It's also increasingly easy to aggregate video and photo content along with text and audio. Media companies (or individual bloggers) can provide multimedia content across the range of categories, becoming aggregators as well as original creators. Just depends which of multiple business models you want to include in your plan.