The “borrowing” site gets lots of traffic and makes money off selling ads on their own site. The newspaper might see some uptick in traffic, but they’re sure not getting any of the “borrowing” site’s revenue.

In the biz, these types of sites are known as aggregators – the Drudge Report, Newser, Gawker and the like. They’re popular. You can visit one of these sites and get a pretty good snapshot of the biggest news of the day.

I bring all this up because reporter Ian Shapira of The Washington Post wrote about this very thing. And because it happened to him when Gawker redid one of his stories. You can check out Shapira’s column here. It’s worth reading and does a pretty good job of showing how it all works.

Shapira’s 1,500-word article involved, among other things: an hour-long phone interview and typing out 3,000 words of notes; attending a two-hour seminar conducted by the subject of the article; four hours of transcribing those notes; and then writing the article.

Quote:

After all the reporting, it took me about a day to write the 1,500-word piece. How long did it take Gawker to rewrite and republish it, cherry-pick the funniest quotes, sell ads against it and ultimately reap 9,500 (and counting) page views?  I called up Hamilton Nolan, the Gawker writer to whom I had been so grateful. “Probably took me,” he said, “you know . . . a half-hour to an hour.”

The problem is pretty basic. Shapira does all the work; another site does a quick rewrite and makes money basically off someone else’s work.

I have a problem with that.

Newspapers are in dire straits. And somehow allowing someone else to profit off a newspaper’s hard work without due compensation doesn’t sit well with me.  I’m not blaming the aggregators for becoming aggregators – they were smart.  But this whole idea that since it’s out on the Internet then it’s free-for-all is wrong.

Would you seriously not have a problem if someone else took your hard work, revamped it a little and made money off it?

Although tongue-in-cheek, or maybe not, Shapira ends his article on his article in a pretty good summation:

Quote:

After talking with Denton, Nolan and others for this article, I still want a fluid blogosphere, but one where aggregators — newspapers included — are more transparent about whom they’re heavily excerpting. They should mention the original source immediately. And if bloggers want to excerpt at length, a fee would be the nice, ethical gesture.

So, Gawker, do me a favor. At least blog this piece. I’ll even write a headline for you (free of charge). How about: “Whiny WashPost Reporter Makes His Point: Respect the Genuine Article”? Oh — one other thing. If you sell ads against your posting, can you cut The Post a check?

Alan Mutter over at Reflections of a Newsosaur has a guest post from the Trib’s editor, Nancy Barnes, about how it’s working out. It’s an interesting article and you should check it out.

Quote: Why are we doing this? We’ve been creating so much content just for the web and have had great success in driving traffic to the web that I just wanted to do something for our paying customers.

Basically, the paper is withholding certain stories from the the web until they appear in the print edition.  Those stories focus on great features, investigative pieces and non-breaking news stories.

Breaking news and daily stories and such will remain the first domain of the web, as they should be.

It’s where we’re headed, and I think we need to move a little more aggressively toward it.

Editor Nancy Barnes, in a note to readers, said, “I’m not sure anyone knows what the right answer is for our business right now. What I do know is that good journalism, the kind an enlightened community like the Twin Cities demands and appreciates, cannot be produced for free. I also believe that we, as an industry, have to drive more value into our printed papers so long as we continue to deliver news that way. So starting last week, we began experimenting with giving some of the best of our journalism to you, our paying print customers, first.”

I think that last sentence should be one of those “duh” moments. I’m not sure why it hasn’t hit others yet.

Why should I pay for something I can get for free?

The print newspaper of the future, if it will exist that is, must focus on in-depth, well-written reporting and storytelling (not lies, but gripping reading.)

“Jen” from Editor and Publisher’s Fitz and Jen column, summed it up perfectly: “Using the print edition as a vehicle for in-depth analysis is something that newspapers should be doing more. Break news online, aggregate local content, upload video, but please don’t forget the very people, the print subscribers, who are footing the bill. They deserve something extra.”

I’ve always advocated newspaper should charge for online content.No one, myself included, knows how that will play out.

But maybe one option toward that end is to create a specialized online version that includes those “print exclusives.” If you want it all, in whatever version/form, you pay for it.

And here are actually a couple of people who know about the subject – Jeff Jarvis and Alan Mutter in an LA Times Op-Ed debate.

Bios from the article:

Jeff Jarvis, author of “What Would Google Do?,” teaches journalism at the City University of New York and writes about news and media on his blog, Buzzmachine.com, and as a columnist for the Guardian.

Alan D. Mutter is a former newspaper editor turned businessman turned independent media analyst. He lives in San Francisco and writes about the impact of technology on the media at his blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur.

Think about it. News links sites like The Drudge Report run links of newspaper headlines. Nothing against Drudge, I use it all the time.

But I also notice there’s lots of ads on those sites. I doubt that money is being shared with newspapers – and it’s the newspapers’ content.

It’s very creative: simply start a link site, build up a lot of traffic and start selling ads. Not a lot of work involved – the newspapers are doing it all for you. Plus their content is free, so what’s the harm?

There are also any number of blog sites – liberal and conservative – that exist for the most part to comment on the news stories they pick up from newspapers. Again, they’ve got ads all over the place. They aren’t sharing that revenue with newspapers.

I just don’t understand why some other entity/person should make money off my (newspaper’s) content, without my getting something out of it.

Newspapers may want to continue down the wrong path of giving away their product (content), but they need to address others who profit from it without fair compensation.

Update: In thinking about this some more, credit is due to those sites that at least do link back; thus driving traffic to the newspapers’ sites. But my point still remains, newspapers need to stop this third-party free use of their content.

Everyone has the right to comment on news, but I’d prefer to see the newspapers somehow driving that conversation, and not just anyone.

2nd update: Found this article in The New York Times, which also looks at this issue.  And no, I didn’t pay for the article, and yes, I see the irony.

Quote: No more free ride to aggregators. Google announced that it would begin selling ads against Google News, with almost no financial accommodation to the organizations that generate that news. The book industry — of all Luddites — has extracted cash from Google, as did the wire services. Google, The Huffington Post and Newser have built their audiences and brands on other people’s labors. Most aggregators are not promoting newspaper content; they are repurposing it to their own ends. Newspapers’ audiences are harvested and sold divorced from the content that attracted them in the first place. The risk would be making Google, the kingmaker on the Web, angry.

When I was a publisher back in the 90s, I charged for content. I thought it was asinine to give our content away for free. I still do. And we had a great web site, thanks to the excellent folks at Morris Digital Works who built it. We even won the best designed web site for newspapers under 10,000 circulation from the Newspaper Association of America. So I think I can speak to this subject with some understanding.

Let’s face it, this is one of the most controversial subjects facing what’s left of the newspaper industry. Either the “web” should be free (it’s not, despite what you think, but that’s another post) or newspapers should charge for their content. There’s really no middle ground.

Hearst Corp. and Newsday recently announced they will start to charge for some content, but exactly how and what remains to be determined. Part of the problem I see is newspaper companies are looking/grasping for any revenue, and the “paid content” idea is an attempt to get something, anything. It’s a little late.

There’s a flurry of ideas out there, from “micropayments” to monthly subscriptions to donations. I’m not crazy about any of them really.

I understand all the arguments for free content – I lived it and debated it for years. There’s no sense rehashing all that here.

In my gut, I just don’t agree with giving away everything for free, especially when I was spending vast sums to gather/distribute it.  And that was/is part of the problem. I can understand “teasing” content on the web to drive readers to the print product – in fact I agree with that concept completely. But I’ve yet to hear a satisfactory answer as to why putting everything on the web will drive people to the print product.

I have yet to talk to anyone (who’s not in the newspaper or “web” business) who doesn’t agree. Every response, in a nutshell, is “why should I pay for the paper when I can read it online for free?”

I’d encourage you to read Alan Mutter’s post today - “Why Media Must Charge For Content” on this very subject.

Here’s an excerpt: When the Internet emerged, most publishers committed the Original Sin of thoughtlessly giving away their content for free in the hopes of attracting millions of page views where they could sell the sort of high-priced ads that had built the value of their print franchises. This monumental strategic blunder resulted in three major unintended, and unfortunate, consequences:

So what should newspaper do?

Well, I still like my original idea best, and yes, partly because it was my idea. And to be totally truthful, the “web” experts thought I was the Antichrist or something for charging.

Anyway, here’s what I did.

1. If you were a subscriber to the print product, we gave you access to the web for free. It was our way of saying “thank you loyal reader for buying our product. We’d like to give you something extra.”

2. Our newspaper was different than most in that about one-third of our readers were single copy. And they were religious about buying it every day. And I got lots of calls from these readers asking why they couldn’t get web access. I agreed with them. So we put a daily password in the paper to accommodate those people. Again, thanks for buying our product, here you go.

3. We charged a minimal amount for non-subscribers to read the paper online – as I recall it was $7 a month or $60 ($5 a month) for an annual subscription. It wasn’t much, probably half a print subscription, but that wasn’t the point. I just placed value in what we did and believed our product was worth something. And you know what, we actually made a nice little chunk of change from charging non-subscribers.

From a pure business standpoint, newspapers do one thing – they “sell” information. And that information comes in two basic forms: ”news” and “advertising.”

Bottom line, people buy newspapers to find out what’s going on and to be informed – whether that’s wondering if the city council raised their property taxes to who won the football game to finding out if their favorite clothing store is having a sale or to find a job.

If you quit “selling” your product, you simply aren’t going to make any money.