The Associated Press has sent new signals in recent days of its intention to protect its content and deal harshly with those who use it extensively. It has proposed a news registry to tag and track its content as it's being used, with the intention of working through arrangements with users to pay for that content.
Setting aside the technical questions about such an approach --- most bloggers and aggregators find it simple to cut and paste content in such a way as to bypass something like AP is proposing --- the larger question of the inherent approach has touched off some extreme criticism of the venerable news agency.
Jeff Jarvis, one of the more notable critics of AP's approach in recent months, is arguing that the assets inside the Internet offer more than AP could --- thus, individuals and organizations should mass and replace it.
In Techdirt, Mike Masnick implies (but doesn't provide clear sourcing) that insiders are critical of AP's approach. He is suggesting Reuters step in and pick up the ball. It should encourage bloggers to link to them instead, he argues.
The New York Review of Books is publishing a series of essays from the respected journalist Michael Massing. The first is a thoughtfully researched look at the evolution of the blog in the context of news and information provided through the Internet. This week Slate.com has taken four people and asked two only to read a paper and two only to surf the Web (but not newspaper sites) in order to stimulate a discussion on who comes away better informed and more frustrated. It will come as little surprise that polls find people don't typically embrace advertising commingled with the content they crave. But a new Harris Interactive poll has some disquieting findings for Internet advertisers and sites that carry them: People don't like the formats, even if the ads themselves aren't bothersome. In his Content Bridges blog, industry veteran Ken Doctor notes the return to profitability for many newspaper firms in the United States. A good thing, he says, but not time to return to business as usual. Dave Winer, online guru and the real founder of RSS, writes that constructing a paywall for content is no solution to what ails the news business. There is another take on the pay-versus-free online news debate from Jeff Sonderman in NewsFuturist: Essentially he says news hasn't been sold at its cost since the emergence of the penny press. If digital advertising is dramatically lower-priced than legacy advertising in reaching an individual, then it only makes sense to wring any costs associated with advertising out of the system. One such cost is building ads with creative departments or agencies. Newspaper alumnus and digital-age consultant Steve Yelvington adds his voice to last week's essay on journalistic upheaval by Clay Shirky (and the response by Philip Meyer). AdAge says the VMS agency has quantified the media buzz --- essentially the public relations buzz --- on Twitter and determined that the attendant publicity totallled some $48 million in the last month. |
I am the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief at Self-Counsel Press, an Adjunct Professor and Executive-in-Residence at the Graduate School of Journalism at University of British Columbia, and the
Executive Director of the Organization of News Ombudsmen. In 2008 I launched themediamanager.com to chronicle media change, then media ethics, standards and freedom. I was recently the mayoralty candidate in Vancouver for the Non-Partisan Association. I am the former CBC Ombudsman of English Services and have held the senior editorial roles at CTV News, The Hamilton Spectator and Southam News. I was the founding Executive Editor of National Post, Managing Editor of The Vancouver Sun, Ottawa Bureau Chief and General News Editor at The Canadian Press, and host on CBC Newsworld, among other media roles. My social networking includes activity on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. I also write for a for-fun-only music site, rockzombies.us Archives
January 2015
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The Canadian analytics firm Sysomos has published new data on nearly 100 million posts it reviewed and it shows
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