Associated Press, Please Dont Fall on Your Sword and Hurt Yourself The Way the NYT Did

It has dawned slowly on big publishing companies like HarperCollins, Bertelsmann (which owns BMG and bought into Napster with 80M,) Penguin, and other of the few conglomerates that run big publishing nowadays that the internet and the flow of info is not a threat, but a huge opportunity. It has come so slowly to their awareness that the buggy whip business model is over, the the age of the combusion engine is past too. That there is an open ore field right within their reach; the internet, those who ply its rivers, those who take from and live from the bounty of the river.

My books are published by Bertelsmann and Harper and I’ve had up close sight of so many layers of big publishing for the last 15 years, including my wanting to send a final manuscript by email in 1990 to pre-Bertelsmann Random House, and them being unable to receive the chapters… They had no email connection, and no publishing head had ever given nor required any of their editors to have a computer, let alone computer skills.

For years, as Napster and iTunes and Bezos built the equivalent of Godzilla’s internet palisades and promonitories, the big publishers, including the NYT whose editor in those times was a friend– big media management did not see the handwriting on the wall that’d been there for at least ten long years– that this was now the computer age, not the IBM Selectric age. That 1000 pages could fly through the air in minutes, instead of being carried by hand and truck and airplane over 1-5 days’ time.

Neither did they rouse to realize even though the air was thick with it… that opinions from ‘outside the castle’, questions, challenges, rumor, information, news, music, and even proprietary information, all, could be dispersed across the world in seconds, blasting right through the gatekeepers’ bastions worldwide. They didn’t get it. They just didn’t. Think of a battleship being told to turn on a dime. Not possible. Now think of bullet boats turning on a dime. Simplistic analogy, but close to what the problem was… including, I hate to say it, lack of being curious, lack of being ‘young’ observing, lack of having point men and women in the know, lack of vivid imagination in this area. And those comprised a sector to public stock have more and more reflected this lack.

So, the NYT experiencing a gross waning of their revenues from ad loss to the internet, thought it smart to convene Times Select. They appeared to be concerned people were reading the NYT online content, but not subscribing to the print edition, and therefor they’d make up that loss by charging money for anyone to read, let alone download or quote from their online articles.

I subscribed because I love the NYT, many of its writers class investigators and thinkers. However, by the time renewal came around, I’d found out I could bypass Times Select and get most articles from the NYT anyway… via Google News. That there was a gaping hole in NYT Select’s design that allowed some in for free.

Even so, as time went on, I noticed I quoted less and less from the NYT. It took too much time to get to the meat. I was caring for my elderly father, watching over my family, working two jobs, having delicate health. Having to use passwords and screen names and verify who you were at NYT Select took time. There was still the great WSJ with its cadre of fissioning thinkers who dove very deeply into issues, there were all the UK papers with their extra dash of spicyness; the internet made all broadcast and cable news availible online, not to mention Yahoo and the venerable BBC, and intrepid on-the-scenes bloggers.

Times Direct failed. I dont know all the reasons why. But a huge reason among the writers in my world was because the costly news at NYT could be gotten elsewhere for free. NYT Select was finally scrapped, and a couple other structures tried. But time had passed. Many writers and bloggers had made their allegiances elsewhere. Some surely came back to read the NYT. I did. But I know too that many did not.

Just watching from the dirt hill outside the big media castles, it appears that the problem for MSM, whether publishers, newspapers, news feeds, etc, has been turning away from the mindset of being a gatekeeper in a purposely walled community that derives a certain sense of status and revenues from squatting over all aspects of the work products… to instead, learning to think like a river…thinking of how to be significant portals, tributaries, tidal pools, currents, flowly freely, rather than building dams.

It seems to me that any news media that wants to charge high fees to read or to quote from them, is putting a dam on a great river that now depends on far more than the dam-builders alone… To dam the river is, I think, to big media’s own detriment. In some cases it’s unplanned suicide. There are many many news sources we writers can choose to quote from, those who are glad to be linked to, and who follow certain of our work as we follow theirs. As Michelle Malkin put it yesterday, AP quotes from her work. Who owes who?

Unlike books, and novels that are written in personal, often one-of-a-kind styles, much news is still conveyed on the who/what/where/why/when and how model. Fair use, in part, is based on the originality of the work. Quoting known facts or re-quoting facts is not generally covered by copyright. There are other facets, that I mention in the above article on Fair Use clause of the Copyright Act.

As I mention in the post above too, it ought be enough to give respect to the AP and its writers to quote from them, say five paragraphs or less of a 20 paragraph+ article, to, as we most often do at TMV, credit the writer by name, block quote their words, and put the link back to the original article. In this way, as with other news sources we quote, we truly respect ‘fair use’ which generally means ‘quoting from,’ rather than taking the entire article or if originally fashioned, the heart of the article wholesale.

And also, as book authors do, giving grace to those who err, and gently reminding them, rather than coming at the little guys like the Drudge Retort with all corporate canons aimed and all flags burning.

My deepest sense is that because a legal battle on this would definitely take place in Federal Court, that The National Writers Union, The Writers Guild, The Authors Guild would likely all rise up to have their say in a way that might not agree at all with AP.

It would be better for AP and others, I think, just as I am stating here… to teach, educate, extend ‘good practices’ that are normally and daily used in most media, academia and mainstream publishing when quoting someone else’s work. This is not some obscure knowlege. Everyone who went to high school and/or college was taught it: Citation, original author, publisher, where stored, date. Quote “from,” but not reprise the entire work of another as your own work product.

If there are issues for AP to take a stand on, I think they’d be on solid ground
–when/if they experience what I and many other book published authors experience on occasion: Someone retypes our print-on-paper work, uploads it to a website without citation, and as its further passed around, our original work loses all it’s identifying personal markers, and finally is e-mailed back to us by others, saying ‘I found this great article you ought to read.’ Except. We already read it because we wrote it ourselves; we are the original author.

–there are also websites that use only our names; someone once told me such websites take authors’ names off Amazon… to draw people to their site for vitamins to make women grow mustaches and men to develop 10-packs and two noses. I imagine some of the AP writers who have also published books get the same treatment.

–There are also websites that somehow download everything I write at TMV, repost it in full, and are only a click-on ad site packed with ads. That too I could see AP objecting to, as it seems the entire point is to get readers to click on ads that say ridiculous things like ‘To see all AP Products for the Home,’ click here. “To see all clothing of the AP brand, click here.” If you click, it takes you to somewhere outer Mongolia where nothing of the actual AP exists at all. This ruse apparently brings money to someone, but we have no idea whom.

As far as I can see, the bloggers who quote and have good fair use practices are not at all the issue for AP.

I hope seeing the larger lay of the land will come to AP, otherwise, they may be, like other media that tried to build and control dams… marginalized. Made much much smaller and much less visible. No surging life.

There’s a reason we dont hear much about Napster any more. Dont take that fate road AP, we regard you way more than that.

____________
CODA

My cobloggr Shaun Mullen put it well too, the last sentence especially in his own more ‘throw the words down rough’ way… From Earth to Aspiring Pundits: There is No Free Lunch in the Blogosphere
” …myself try to stay out of trouble by doing one simple thing:

“Always give credit where it is due to both the primary source and the blog or website through which I might have found the primary source. This is especially pertinent when it comes to use of photographs and other images without permission, and I will hold off using an image if I cannot ascertain its owner and don’t believe it to be in the public domain.

“That few bloggers have such standards, let alone any standards, says less about the Wild West nature of the blogosphere than the ignorance of many of the cowboys and cowgirls.”