Saving the media pros from the Web parasites

The news about the news media is bleak. I'm not sure which is spiraling downward faster, the media or the talk about what to do about the media. Actually, the latter seems to be just going around in circles, covering the same topics.

The latest to posit on the proposition of how to financially support quality and costly journalism are a federal judge and a Cleveland newspaper columnist. They both use the "death spiral" analogy we hear so often. Both lay some of the blame on parasites on the Internet who feed off the news generated by the professionals.

In a blog posting, Judge Richard Posner of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sees it this way: "A newspaper with shrinking revenues can shrink its costs only by reducing the number of reporters, columnists and editors, and when it does that quality falls, and therefore demand, and falling demand means falling revenues and therefore increased pressure to economize -- by cutting the journalist staff some more. This vicious cycle, amplified by the economic downturn, may continue until very little of the newspaper industry is left."

Meanwhile, Connie Schultz says in her Plain Dealer column "parasitic aggregators reprint or rewrite newspaper stories, making the originator redundant and drawing ad revenue away from newspapers at rates the publishers can't match. The inevitable consequence: diminished revenue and staff cuts. ...

"It's also a downward spiral toward extinction."

The solution?

Posner calls for tightening copyright laws to bar even paraphrasing or linking to copyrighted material on the Internet without the consent of the copyright holder.

This would require a bit of rethinking about what has become known as the Fairness Doctrine. For example, in this column I am taking snippets of the writing of others and attributing it to them. That is considered fair use. When writing online I provide a link. Rather than a drain, links can boost Web site traffic and, supposedly, the site's worth to advertisers.

Schultz offers some thoughts from First Amendment attorney David Marburger and his brother Daniel, an economics professor at Arkansas State University.

She says the Marburgers have suggested changing federal copyright law to allow those who originate news to retain its commercial value by virtue of exclusivity for 24 hours.

David Marburger cites a 1918 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that found the International News Service was engaging in unfair competition by rewriting Associated Press stories and selling them to newspapers in competition with The AP. The court issued an injunction but only for the time period in which the news retained its commercial value.

The Marburgers, anticipating that critics would charge that newspapers want to monopolize the news, reply, "No, we want to temporarily stop the unfair practice of those who use the sweat of our brow to compete against us."

BuzzMachine blogger and professor Jeff Jarvis dismisses both of the above while missing the point.

Jarvis hypothesizes thusly: "So if the Plain Dealer reported exclusively that, say, the governor had just returned from a tryst with a Argentine lady, no one else could so much as talk about that for 24 hours."

No, the newspaper should have exclusive rights to its original reporting, its phrasing, its presentation. If others, once alerted by the paper, can independently confirm through their own contacts and sources, then report it in their own words, that does not infringe.

If others cannot confirm, they should properly attribute to those who did the heavy lifting and paid the reporters. They should provide their readers with a link to the original.

Jarvis further makes the specious argument that under the Shultz-Marburger-Posner scenario, hot news would become the sole possession of the first on the scene.

"Look at how fast the Michael Jackson news spread," he says. "Under these guys' scheme, TMZ would have had exclusive right to publish his death for a day."

In reality, a number of responsible Web sites, unable to confirm TMZ's news (or speculation?), linked to and/or attributed to TMZ, until their own sources reliably confirmed.

Someone does need to find a way under existing copyright laws to start lynching the rustlers of intellectual property, or we will see its value diminish -- perhaps even disappear.

Thomas Mitchell is editor of the Review-Journal and writes on the role of the press. He may be contacted at 383-0261 or via e-mail at tmitchell@reviewjournal.com. Read his blog at lvrj.com/blogs/mitchell.