… Having spent more than three years doing dissertation research on the changing journalistic ecosystem in Philadelphia, I was excited to see Technically Philly get a great write up last week. And having spent the past six months as a research assistant with the Downie-Schudson report on reconstructing American journalism, I see a connection between Technically Philly, CUNY’s New Business Models For News, and the report. The nub of the connection has to do with building stronger news networks and deciding on the network ties we allow ourselves to utilize when we build them… [Read More at the Nieman Lab]

… So an interesting way to approach the question of journalistic use of Twitter might be to consider: Why am I, a professor of journalism, encouraged to blog, tweet, and engage in public dialog about journalism, but still trusted to speak the “truth,” while journalists are not? Why am I not required to “relinquish some of the personal privileges of private citizens” in order to do my job well? Why am I allowed to get up in front of a classroom everyday and teach youngsters how to “do journalism,” while journalists themselves have to give up some of the personal privileges of private citizens? What is it about journalistic professionalism that demands the monk-like embrace of personal rectitude? … [Read More at the Nieman Lab]

[...] Here’s a application of the model I proposed in the last post, picking a few new and old media organizations out at random. There’s Gawker, which I mentioned last week. It sits near the middle of the “institutionalized–deinstitutionalized axis,” and is of moderate size and moderate openness. (It relies upon and integrates its commenters, but doesn’t do much “citizen journalism” per se.) Gawker tends to be further toward the commentary/link-gathering end of the spectrum than the reporting end (though not entirely).

But where this starts to make sense is when we add other organizations — because now we’re not talking about absolute qualities of an organization but relational qualities. (The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu once argued that “the relational is the real.”) [Read More at Nieman Lab]

[...] If we wanted to plot a new journalism timeline on a nice little graph, we would emphasize dynamic organizational movement along four axes: (a) the type of work predominant in your organization, (b) how traditionally “institutionalized” your organization is, (c) your institutional resources, and (d) how open or closed your organization is to non-affiliated members (volunteers, etc). And when we talk about the history of online journalism, we can trace the movements of different people, or organizations, or wide-scale “centers of gravity,” across all four of these axes. [...] [Read Full Post at Nieman Lab]

Folks who have been reading this blog for a long time — which isn’t many of you, but I think there are a few of you out there– know that I’ve had several homes for my online writing since 2001 or so. Between 2001 and 2008, I wrote a lot for the NYC Independent Media Center and the Indypendent, mostly media analysis pieces and “traditional” reporting for a pioneer citizen’s journalism project. From 2005 until 2007, I blogged about issues more related to my academic research at “Unpacking My Library.” And since then, I’ve been writing over here at the J-School blog. Now, I’ve got two announcements.

The first is that I have a new academic webpage, http://www.cwanderson.org/ [still under construction]. This is a largely static site, but its meant to be a one-stop repository for my entire digital persona: syllabi, classes I teach at CSI, news articles and op-eds, academic articles, and links to my Twitter feed, my de.lio.cious tags, and  to my blog posts.

That takes me to my second, bigger announcement: starting today I’ll be blogging for the Nieman Lab at Harvard University. Someone once said that the Nieman Lab blog is the CJR for the 21st century, and I’m inclined to agree (though, I like CJR a lot for other reasons, and, in fact, will be having an article come out in it this fall) … so I’m obviously thrilled at the chance to contribute to what they are doing there.

What this basically means for this blog is this: I’ll still be updating it, though generally speaking, my heavy-duty journalism posts will appear over at Nieman. You can more or less expect posts of the same length  (long) and time between posts (intermittent) as here. And I’ll make sure to post a very small excerpt and link of whatever I contribute there onto this blog, so folks can still get a general sense of the entire drift of what I’ve been thinking since 2005.

So, like I said, if you’re interested in what I think is happening in the worlds of journalists and geeks, journalism education, or journalism and public policy issues, point your browsers and RSS readers to the Nieman Lab blog. Thanks to everybody, especially long time readers, for giving me the chance to really stretch my blogging muscles, improve my thinking, and the chance to take my public writing to the next level.

See y’all soon.

Chris

[note: much of the insight into this post came from Gabriella Coleman and the commenters on her blog. I think that one of the major developments in journalism has already been, and will continue to be, the integration of journalism and computer programming (indeed, see http://www.holovaty.com/writing/fundamental-change/ for a perfect example) and I'm hoping to build my next big research project on these types of questions. For journalists who are interested in this topic, I'd recommend regular reading Biella's blog and the blog Hacker Visions. I'd also rec' the book Two Bits, by Christopher Kelty, which you can read for free here.]

Yesterday, a big piece of news hit the “future-of-journalism community”– Everyblock, a “microlocal” news project started by web developer and former online newspaper employee Adrian Holovaty, had been purchased by msnbc.com for an undisclosed sum (speculation and rumors ran somewhere in the low 7  6-figures). Everyblock began as a 2-year funded project of the Knight News Challenge, and when its funding period expired, Holovaty was openly musing on what the next steps in the project would be, and how it could be sustained without the grant. (This is a big question facing nearly all the grant-supported journalism projects that have emerged in the last two years.) So the purchase of Everyblock looked like a win-win-win all around; the project could go on, it would “infect” the wider news ecosystem with its forward thinking energy; the creators would receive a monetary reward for their work. And best of all, the original code of Everyblock, under the terms of the Knight Challenge Grant, was available to the world because it was required to be open source.

The only sticking point– perhaps only to me, though I saw that Brian Boyer and a few other folks on Twitter mention things along similar lines– was that all future versions of the code (including versions compiled by the developers after June 30 before the msnbc.com sale) were not required to be open. In fact, as was made clear in an interview with Paid Content on the day of the sale:

The future of the code: EveryBlock’s platform is open source, meaning it can potentially be replicated by competing sites. But Holovaty and Tillinghast say that others will only have access to the code as it existed on June 30—when it was initially released—meaning MSNBC.com will likely have an edge over any competitors. “What happens after that we’re not obligated to make that open source,” Holovaty says, adding that so far only a handful of sites have actually adopted the code.

As I tweeted earlier in the day, this seemed like something of a reappropriation of “common work” by “capital” (two loaded terms, but hey, whats Twitter for?)– in which grant money was basically used to fund the beta development of a piece of software that was (once it was far enough along) bought-up and locked-up by a very large media and software company. Of course, this happens all the time in the digital world, but it seemed contradictory to Knight’s original goals of making the code open source in the first place; or so I assumed, knowing nothing at all about what Knight really wanted.

As I started investigating what was legal and what was ethical surrounding the Everyblock sale, I once again realized how little journalists (and most communications professors) know about the world of Free and Open-Source Software (and how little, in some ways, the residents of that world know about journalism). There’s a lot that journalists, coders, and (in particular) foundations like Knight can learn from this, the first big acquisition of a Challenge project by “big media.”

The gist is this: Under the terms of their initial GPL, Holovaty and the other developers can do whatever they want with their code (after fulfilling the Knight requirement) because they hold copyright. There’s additional nuance brought about by the fact that Everyblock is a web service and not and piece of “software” per se. The is a difference– and thus some confusion to me– between a “BSD” license and a GPL license (confusion because Knight required Everyblock to be released under GPL v 3.o. This initial requirement also raises the question– to me– about how closely Everyblock is following the spirit, if not the letter, of the original Knight grant by allowing MSNBC to claim proprietary rights over future versions Everblock). I also learned that not everyone in the “Free and Open Source Software” community agrees with everyone else, and some people probably wont agree with anything I’ve just said. There’s even a debate (a big one) about the difference between “Free” and “Open” software.

Thats the gist. If you want to get into details, click below. Also below, I dispense some unasked for advice to the Knight Foundation about how they can signal their code intentions more clearly going forward.

One more thing: What would I like to see? I’d like to see all future versions of code devloped under the Knight grant remain open, whoever buys them. I think this is an ethical use of Knight grant money — and a good business strategy as well.

Point One: The difference between free and open source matters. Unless it doesn’t.

There isn’t just a debate about whether it is better to have “free” or “open source”  software, there’s a debate about whether its worthwhile to even have a debate. As Wikipedia summarizes:

‘F/OSS’ is an inclusive term generally synonymous with both free software and open source software which describe similar development models, but with differing cultures and philosophies. ‘Free software’ focuses on the philosophical freedoms it gives to users and ‘open source’ focuses on the perceived strengths of its peer-to-peer development model. Many people relate to both aspects and so ‘F/OSS’ is a term that can be used without particular bias towards either camp.

Richard Stallman has written eloquent, and frequent, essays on the differences that he sees between the two cultures, and you can get a flavor of them here. Keep in mind, though, that he’s writing for a particular perspective (one that thinks that a. there’s a difference, and b. that free is better. Its a perspective I agree with, I think, but everyone certainly does not.)

Point Two: A bigger difference exists between a GPL liscense and a permissive free software license, of which a “BSD” license is one example.

Simplifying greatly, the foundational plank of the GPL license is that all future versions of the software, or whatever, have to be as (if not more) free than the current version (by free meaning, as the saying goes, not “free as in beer but free as in freedom.” Under a BSD license, “any copies and derivatives of the source code created under permissive licenses may be made available on terms that are more restrictive than those of the original license.” In other words, they can be forked and rendered proprietary. There are old and new debates about this here, here, here, and here.

The only reason why this matters for the current debate is that, since the Everyblock code was eventually forked and (apparently) closed by msnbc.com, it might have made more sense to just release the code under a”permissive free” rather than a GPL license; at the very least, it would have given a clearer signal about the intentions behind the developers and the Knight foundation– i.e., that the code was ultimately intended for business use and would probably be closed.  All that said, though, Knight was writing fairly passionately about the value of “open source” as it rolled out its calls for Challenge entries, so its unclear about what they actually wanted from their licenses– or whether they really new what they wanted in the first place. All of this said, there are two more big complexities that deserved to be spelled out.

3. AGPL vs GPL: What’s a “web service” and why does it matter?

There’s a possibility that none of this may matter at all, that, since Everyblock is (may be?) technically a web service and not a piece of software, there’s a “GPL loophole.” As James Vasile writes on his blog:

Since Everyblock is a web service, msnbc.com can use it on its own servers and never distribute it at all. GPLv3 only protects access to source code when software is distributed. Merely running the code doesn’t trigger any obligations, which means that msnbc.com can improve the code on its own and never share it with anybody.

Vasile adds:

These caveats raise two important considerations. If you are going to contribute to a project that is a web service, insist on a better license than GPLv3. Use the Affero GPL, Version 3 or later.

The differences between the AGPL and the GPL are spelled out in more detail here.

4. The rights of the intellectual property holder (or holders!) trump all.

The license, whichever one it is, is not a restriction on the copyright holder of the software; its the terms by which the owner of the intellectual property licenses all subsequent uses. This is how the Knight Grant describes the intellectual property terms under which the journalism code is created:

Do I hold the intellectual property rights for my idea?

Yes. The applicant holds the intellectual property rights, subject to Knight Foundation’s requirement that the intellectual property be shared with the world. By entering the contest you agree to share those rights with the world in line with open-source, open-standard philosophy. Once you submit your idea, others will be able to comment on it. They will be also be able to share it with their friends and rate it.

They are freely giving you their wisdom, and by doing that, they are agreeing to let you incorporate their ideas into your project. If you win, however, under the open-source rules you’ll have to share your software code and other know-how with everyone.

Aside from that restriction (which is tied to the grant) the software developer can do whatever he or she wants. And although Stallman and the partisans of the GPL argue that developing unfree software is unethical under pretty much any circumstance, its also pretty clear that not everyone agrees.

One interesting discussion thread at Gabriella Coleman’s blog revolved around how, in the case of many GPL liscensed pieces of software, the copyright holder problem is avoided (or rendered less pressing) by the fact that there are multiple copyright holders.

—

This post has gone on for much to long, so I want to stop here and get to what all this means for the future of the Knight Challenge grant– which to me is the actually important question. I always tried to say in my tweets on this subject that I’ve got no problem with– and am very impressed by and happy for Adrian Holovaty and the Everyblock team. I do think, however, that Knight has got some thinking to do as it ponders what its notion of “open source” means in the context of its grant. As a layman, when I have been reading about the Knight licenses I have always thought– “this is great! not only will the original code be open but all derivations and future versions of it will too because it has such a strong GPL!” Obviously this is not the case, but it seems to me its partly a signaling problem.

So, what could Knight do?

1. Hold the copyright themselves, or deposit it with the Free Software Foundation, thus assuring — ironically — that the software remains truly free forever. This seems fairly extreme, however, though I understand that it is at least occasionally done.
2. Require that the code be released under an AGPL rather than a GPL. This would not solve every issue, though it would be a statement about what Knight hopes will happen to its funded projects.
3. Release the code under a BSD, not a GPL. Again, this would not restrict the CR holder, but it would once again be a signal of intent.
4. Append a statement to the grant description, giving Knights’ general philosophy on how they want their funded projects to be used after the grant period is over. Again, not binding, but a signal.

As the Journalism Program Director Gary Kebbel wrote in the Knight blog:

the grant agreement only requires that fully functional code be released at the end of the grant period, which it was on June 30. EveryBlock.com is not required to release future updates. You raise an important point about what Knight Foundation might think about when structuring future grant agreements that require code releases.

So, it seems to me like they are still figuring this out. What would I like to see? I’d like to see all future versions of code devloped under the Knight grant remain open, whoever buys them. I think this is an ethical use of Knight grant money — and a good business strategy as well.

ACAP, hNews, CircLabs, the Information Valet, Attributor … this summer, a number of initiatives designed to squeeze one last  drop of value from the well-juiced orange of news have been breathlessly announced. If you’re like me, most of these plans eventually start to blur together into one big “they want to charge for content” miasma. But, they’re actually different enough that I think it would be valuable to break them all down into a few general categories. It seems clear that, by the winter of 2010, many if not most online news products will have launched a variety of payment initiatives, so it might not be a bad idea to get an idea of what could be coming down the road.

I want to be clear: this is a limited overview of some of the ways people are talking about funding journalism in the online era. I don’t get into some of the more forward-looking projects, like Spot.us or Kaiser Health News. I’m not even getting into what I think is the only real question about journalism worth asking: what are news organizations going to add to what they already do in order to generate new revenue? The title of this post sums up, I think, the gist plans outlined here: squeezing value from traditional online content.

Finally, you’ll notice that I don’t discuss the Steven Brill venture “Journalism Online.” To be honest, while Journalism Online was first out of the “create value by charging” box, I have had trouble figuring out exactly what it is they’re planning to do. At best, they want to do a little but of everything I outline here, but it seems like, at least for now, they are primarily a consortium empowered by struggling newspapers to “figure it out,” rather than an entity possessing any actual plan.

I divide the numerous “value from content” plans into four general categories: (a) the paywall, (b) tracking users for ads (c) tracking content for extraction (d) reinstate online scarcity via legal doctrine.

The Paywall

In some ways, this is the classic: if information “doesn’t want to be free,” or if it wants to be free and freedom is unsustainable, than the obvious answer is: information should cost money. And the way to get money from information is to make it unavailable except for those who pay.

The patron saint of the paywall is Walter Hussman, the editor-in-chief of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, who has argued consistantly that news should not be given away “for free” online. Many newspapers and news media owners, including both Rupert Murdoch and the New York Times, appear to be considering variations on this model.  In 2009, the Newspaper Association of American produced a study on industry paywalls [pdf]. The emerging argument from those advocating for paywalls is that the last decade of (mostly free) online delivery was a disastrous  multi-year experiment that is now coming to a close.

My own quantitative research has demonstrated that there is a meaningful  correlation between paywalls and the stabilization of print circulation  in the few cities where walls have been opperative long enough to conduct meaningful analysis. However, as research has also documented, the primary monetary effect of paywalls is to drive readers to print rather than make money online, which is a business strategy whose long-term viability is, at best, debateable.

The question confronting advocates of paywalls is not: was not charging for content the “original sin?” Nor is the problem one of whether or not media consumers can be “retrained” to pay for content. The problem is more deeply structural.  As research by W. Russell Neumann has shown [pdf], while the growth of media consumption from 1960 until 2005 increased on a linear scale, the growth of media supply increased exponentially, with the ratio of consumption to supply minutes moving from near zero to more than 20,000 to 1. In other words, if discussions about “what to charge for” are to make sense, they must be premised on this deeply structural change in the media environment.

This fundamental news oversupply, which can be said to have resulted in the deep “commoditization” of media content, has lead most pay advocates to embrace a modified form of charging, what might be called the” 80/20 Paywall” system. In effect, the logic here goes that while most readers will not plunk down money for general news, they will pay for unique, niche information that they cannot get anywhere else. The question then becomes– how to generate that unique content, and how to know for sure what people want? A more fundamental problem, perhaps, is that the task of providing niche content is one that newspapers– the current bastions of traditional “reporting”– have not done. In fact, their organizations have largely been premised on the opposite mission and business model.

Track User Behavior to Improve Ad Targeting

A second model largely bypasses the notion of putting news behind a paywall; instead, it embraces the current advertising support media system, but attempts to make that system better; and by better, I mean “more revenue generating.”  As Bill Grueskin notes, “We hear a lot about the death of journalism these days, but much of the crisis really amounts to the death of advertising, or at least advertising as we knew it.”

Both ViewPass and CircLabs would be built on a one-time registration system, and both “would support payments for individual articles, subscriptions and bundles of content. But as ViewPass co-creator Alan Mutter notes, the primary value of these registration systems would be “the data they assembled on each individual consumer, because the data would enable publishers to sell their advertising inventory at premium rates to advertisers seeking to target their messages to the most likely consumers … The data would enable superior ad targeting, thereby improving consumer response. Improved response would generate higher CPMs, boosting revenues as advertisers competed for access to the availabilities.”

Solutions like CircLabs and ViewPass would have the advantage of seeking to improve the existing advertising-supported model of news delivery rather than overturn it. The two primary difficulties with these model would probably come from the barriers they would present to users behavior (the need to register or to provide other forms of demographic information) and privacy concerns. A number of commentators discussing the ViewPass or CircLabs plan have agreed with the notion that the key to newspapers’ future lies in a better understanding of online advertising, but have doubted that “newspaper companies have the chops in mathematics to understand machine learning, natural language processing, semantics, association rule mining, etc.”

Track Content and Extract Value

A third general approach also largely abandons the notion of a paywall, and focuses instead on tracking online news content and, where possible, extracting value from that content. Various proposals floated by the AP, including ACAP and hNews fall roughly into this category.  These proposals make use of what is called “microformatting,” and would supposedly allow news organizations to track their content as it flows across the web; in a press release, the AP emphasized that this tracking would allow content originators to “crack down” on blogs and aggregators that were “misappropriating content” without permission.  But Yelvington noted on his blog: “from the perspective of building a better Internet, [hnews]‘is a good idea. From the perspective of stopping bad people from stealing, it’s utterly ineffective. We should understand what it really does, and adopt it for what it really is, and drop the silly posturing about how it’s going to make all our financial troubles vanish. Because it’s not that, not at all. What it is, is a good thing.”

Much of the confusion about what hNews will really do has been attributed to political and organizational battles inside the AP itself; namely, the organizations’ desire to keep its member newspapers from bolting by promising them the benefit of moth the microformat and advanced, RIAA-esque copyright protection. Other online confusion has stemmed from the AP’s consistant track record of overly aggresive and often absurd attempts to assert copyright protection over its material.

It should be noted, as an aside, that the Attributor plan, while bearing some passing similarities to  the ACAP and hNews enforcement model, differs from these plans insofar as it seems to put the emphasis on revenue sharing with organizations that “steal” online content rather than “cracking down” or suing those organizations. As Zachary Seward describes it:

“Organizations using Attributor don’t want to shut down splogs and their ilk, which would be a largely sisyphean task of enormous cost. Instead, the consortium is negotiating with the networks that serve ads against pirated content to negotiate a substantial share of that revenue.”

The difficulty here, of course, would be getting Google, Yahoo, and other owners of advertising networks to go along with the plan. A second difficulty may stem from the fact that there may be very little revenue to be extracted from the kind of “pirates” said to be operating on the back of the news industry.

Bring Back “Unjust Competition”: The Marburger Plan

Because, like hNews and ACAP, it would rely on “going after” online organizations that are supposedly “parasitical” on news content, the Marburger plan is easy to lump in with the AP plan. But it is actually quite different, and would not rely on copyright at all. Instead, it would basically make competing with newspapers illegal. While that is a somewhat extreme interpretation, in the Marbuger’s own words the plan would seek to restore the pre-digital balance between original news reporting outlets and advertisers by giving content originators a common law remedy to charge “unjust competition” with newspapers in a court of law. “The change the Marburgers are pushing for is more about adding some sort of economic hardship to these competitors such that they’re more likely to form an economic relationship with the newspapers that originate the news stories.” [techdirt].

With those clarifications, the heart of what the Marburger’s propose can be gleaned from this discussion between themselves and of Mike Masnick of Techdirt. In essence, the debate is about what newspapers and their online competitors do, and where value comes from online:

David Marburger: “There can be no doubt that summarizing a story that someone else wrote creates a close substitute for the original story. It is silly to pretend otherwise. Adding a link at the end is a nice touch, but can’t amount to fair compensation for taking and commercially exploiting the originator’s hefty journalistic services. That’s because the summary makes clicking on the link redundant. Why read the same story twice?” As a way to justly and not parasitically expand on newspapers work, Marburger argues that blogs can “expend your own resources to verify the original story and possibly add new information that your discover using your own efforts.”

Mike Masnic: “[The Marbugers'] examples of “parasitic aggregators” is also quite odd. It’s basically any competitor who has real staff that writes a story that competes with the original reporting. That’s not an aggregator. It’s competition. And if someone who was not on the scene can actually add so much value to the news that the original reporter doesn’t provide enough value, the problem is in the original publication for doing a poor job in providing enough scarce value beyond the basic facts.”

The debate, in short, is about externalities, value creation, and work.

***

After this summer of blowing-hard and rolling out big ideas, the Fall should be where the real fun begins. Here are some predictions:

1. News organizations with confidence in their own originality (the NYTimes, the Financial Times, others) and brand value will strike off on a version of the “paywall” plan on their own.

2. News organizations without such confidence (the Philadelphia Inquirer, anyone?) will join Journalism Online and place their fate in the hands of Steven Brill and Co. They too will probably institute some paywall format.

3. When looking at the “track the users” or “track the content” plans (CircLabs, ViewPass, Attributor, hNews) it will be interesting to see what Google does, if anything. Obviously some form of ad network accommodation with Attributor would mark a significant boon for them. Endorsing the hNews microformat would also be huge. Up til now, there seems to be little chance of Google doing either of those things, and I dont see how either of these plans can work without their buy-in. Expect to see heavy competition on the microformat angle from already existing tagging plans. It will also be interesting to see if the AP has learned from its disastrous roll out of hNews and comes back with a new description of what they’re doing.

4. The Marburger plan seems dead in the water. As something requiring Congressional action, I have a hard time seeing a law like that ever passing.

Fun months ahead.

Summary: this would be a new four-part test to add to the already existing four-part “fair use” test.

1. The presence and quality of the link.
2. Does the new format provide the opportunity for democratic engagement that is unavailable at the original provider?
3. Courts should consider this balance: between the added value of information (provided by the so-called appropriator) and amount of appropriation of the “original” work.
4. What is the overall purpose  and character of the appropriating organization?

—

I’m not a lawyer, though I have spent a lot of time thinking about copyright law, fair-use, the so-called “hot news doctrine,” and other related matters over the last few months. Much of this reflection has been occasioned by a growing argument in some (but only some) segments of the news industry that was best summed up by the AP’s Tom Curley in today’s New York Times: “If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines, and we’re going to do that.”

The argument over this has gotten so ridiculously stupid, its difficult to recap all the recent back and forth without this turning into a very long blog post. But the nadir of the argument was summed up in the New York Times article mentioned above:

Tom Curley, The A.P.’s president and chief executive, said the company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. In an interview, he specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article.

The difficulty of Curley’s own position is put into sharp relief by what he doesn’t want to discuss with the Times; “Mr. Curley declined to address the fair use question.”

The legal concept of fair use is ably summed up, not surprisingly, in a really great Wikipedia article. The concept of fair use is not hard and fast law per se, but rather consists of a four part “balancing test” in which the various circumstances that lie behind an alleged infringement are weighed from case to case. The four part criteria for claiming fair use is:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

I think its generally agreed that arguments  fair use and the so-called “hot news doctrine” work better in the analog world than they do in the digital. So, here’s the question: what would fair use look like in the digital era?

I think something a lot of lawyers and media executives often forget is that the digital information world has its own ethical standards and best practices, practices that may not be written down but have emerged out of the internet’s own practices and history. And even people who are very friendly to the basic web-way of doing things will get angry when these practices are deliberately flaunted; take concepts like “hot linking,” as well as others. I think that the internet’s own culture and best practices should form the bedrock starting for thinking about how fair use should opperate in the digital era. And the fact that the AP’s own FAQ about its proposed micro-tagging system doesn’t include a single link tells me they still haven’t got a clue about what these practices are.

So below, I list a few ideas, drawn from the culture of the web, that could go into a revised understanding of fair use. I see them as primarily additive, not substitutional, though their incorporation into fair-use doctrine might change the overall tenor of the concept. I want to emphasize  that I’m not a lawyer, that this is a very off the top of my head kind of list, and I’m largely putting it up for discussion and push back, especially by people who have devoted their lives to thinking about these sorts of issues. So I’m hoping this can be the a jumping off point for an intelligent and continued discussion.

—

If we wanted to think about what fair use would look like in an online era, what should we consider? In the list below, I refer to two kind of articles or blog posts: the “originating” entity, and the appropriating entity. In this blog post, for instance, the New York Times would be the originating entity, and Wordyard would be the appropriating entity. (For the record, even originating entities are appropriating entities– the entire notion of journalism is grounded on a form of appropriation– though I am going to bracket that argument for now and pretend we can make a meaningful distinction here.)

1. The quality of link. It should, by 2009, go without saying that any article making use of information read, cited, discussed, or originated elsewhere should clearly link back to that information. This is kindergarten-level internet protocol. If an article appropriated content from elsewhere, either directly, as a source, or in the form of a rewrite, and didn’t link back to the original source, this would be a big strike against the appropriating entity. (I should note, at this point, that this would probably do more to show traditional, non-linking news orgs are violation of fair use than bloggers, but, hey, you get what you ask for if you open this can of worms.)

If we set linking as a baseline, we can go one step further: of what quality is the link? There’s a big difference between an article that links to its source five paragraphs in, for example, and those that do so in the first paragraph. And online entities, I can tell you for a fact, make these kind of decisions all the time.

2. Does the new format provide the opportunity for democratic engagement that is unavailable at the original provider? If you want to know why I think the HuffPo is eating the AP’s lunch, it has less to do with the fact that they are supposedly “stealing” AP content than the fact that all their articles include spaces for passionate conversing, remixing, tagging, and other web 2.0 activities, options that still aren’t available at many news orgs. Deliberation, of course, is just as democratic an activity as news-gathering is.

Now, simply tossing up the content of an entire article and adding a space for comments wouldn’t give you a “get out of jail free” card. Obviously, this is just one of a larger series of factors. But, it should be a factor.

3. Courts should consider this balance: between the added value of information (provided by the appropriator) and level of appropriation of the original work. Or in other words: sites that add value to the original content, either in the form of other links, extended commentary, new information or facts, etc, should be allowed a greater amount of freedom in order to draw upon the work of originating content. Sites that do nothing with the original content, other than rewrite it or collect it in a running series of links, should get less leeway to excerpt (though this doesn’t mean they should get no leeway at all).

4. What is the overall purpose  and character of the appropriating organization? This would take us out the realm of individual peces of online content, and force courts to consider the overarching character and mission of the appropriating entity (something I don’t think they do already, though maybe I’m wrong). To do this, you’d look at the history and content of the organization. Is it something like Talking Points Memo, which serves a noble public mission? Or is it a spam website? Obviously, this matters a lot. Google, for instance, could make a (very) strong argument that its linking and excerpting serves the purpose of organizing the content of the entire world-wide web.I’d defer to that if I was a judge.  A website than consisted of nothing more than a series of headlines and links to a few newspapers, on the other hand, would have a harder argument to make.

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I want to be clear that I don’t think this list is exclusive. I also don’t think, though, that we can continue pretending that these issues dont exist and we can remain at the level of just screaming “fair use” and “copyright” back and forth at each other. If this issue is litigated, it has huge implications for our communicative futures; lets no be digital ignoramouses and screw it up.

Today, Jon Kleinberg, Jure Leskovec, and Lars Backstrom probably experienced every serious scholar’s fondest wish and worst nightmare — their path-breaking article, “Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle,” [pdf] was written up in the New York Times. The Times article was pretty good, as these things go, but I imagine that the authors are now in the process, as Scott Rosenberg put it, of watching their nuanced and complex scholarship become a meme itself … a “the news media leads the blogs by 2.5 hours in reporting news” meme.

The best thing to do is read the report itself, though the Rosenberg post is a great summary with some cogent criticisms, and the New York Times article is, all and all, a good summary. Rather than rehashing the discussion sor far, I want to talk a little bit about some of my own findings which I think complicate the Cornell research.

This May, I presented my own research on news diffusion and the new news cycle at the International Communications Association (ICA) conference in Chicago. The research comes out of my dissertation fieldwork, and I’m quite proud of it. It’s also as different from the Leskovec et. al. research as it is possible to be when you’re addressing the same subject matter.  The paper is also, as luck wold have it, in peer-review hell, which means that (as far as I’m concerned) while its publishable and public, put the powers that be haven’t decided that yet.

But after reading the paper, the New York Times article, and some caveats about the paper, I wanted to weigh in with a summary my own findings, which I feel stand toe to toe with the “Meme-Tacking” paper — even though you may not think so, because there were no computers involved.

I so I want to talk a little bit about what I did and what I found, and then talk a bit about quantitative and qualitative research.

What I Looked At

My case study was the first (to the best of my knowledge) academic study to analyze the diffusion of a single news story from the moment it was reported to the moment that it died, from within the newsroom itself in the context of the new media ecosystem. In other words, I followed the diffusion of the fairly small story of the Francisville Four, a few left-leaning Philadelphia homeowners who were illegally evicted from their home after posting “anti-surveillance” fliers in their neighborhood.

What did I find? Several things, all of which I think add complexity to the Cornell study.

1. The story of the Francisville 4 was “broken” by an activist-affiliated news website, the Philadelphia Independent Media Center, along with a progressive news and discussion board, Young Philly Politics. Breaking the story in this case, though, amounted to little more than re-posting a press release, which led to discussion and debate in the online mediasphere about what was an appropriate level of reporting in order for this story to count as “news.” (This online debate should also prompt us to think about what it means to “lead” the news cycle in the era of the web.)

2. The first piece of “serious” reporting on the story was done, not by one of the major dailies, but by the local alt-weekly, the City Paper … and they put up on their blog. Media organizations like the City Paper are often overlooked in our discussions of the new news cycle. It also complicates the entire notion of what “counts” as “news media” and what counts as a blog (is the blog of an alt. weekly part of the MSM? is it a blog? is it something else? Its tough to say).

3. The daily newspapers first weighed in on the story several days after it broke. They did, however, do the most original reporting. They also started covering the story, not because they had seen it online, but because the activists involved had mounted a deliberate and old-fashioned media campaign to publicize the arrests (sending emails and faxes, calling press conferences, etc). They also started covering it because folks at the City Paper sent out emails touting their scoop to all the daily papers.

4. Almost 2.5 hours after the daily newspapers published their news –and here’s where the Cornell study comes in– the “traditional” blogosphere weighed in on the arrests. How should we talk, however, about the days of media work that occurred before the “blogosphere” picked up the news? Does it count? And how does that early work relate to the 2.5 hours meme?

5. Related: what did the local bloggers do? In some ways, they played the role of “commentators.” But they also played a key part in the news cycle by both linking to, and adding a ton of context to the Francisville story. They didn’t all do original reporting per se, but they provided new information  via heavy linking out to older news coverage and other blogs. They also “reframed” the story in a way that helped it travel more easily through the global blogosphere. Indeed, this new information helped it reach the top of the Technorati hierarchy via coverage in Boing Boing.

6. The story died, not because of events in the media, but because the activists and the press decided it was in their best interest to no longer pursue a confrontation.

There’s a lot more in the paper itself … but hopefully, this gives you an idea of some of my findings. To me, they provide a much more complex picture of how the new news cycle is unfolding than the large-sale, quantitative Cornell study.

But …

Qualitative and Quantitative Research

… more complex and interesting findings, yes. But perhaps less generalizable. And this is how I want to conclude this blog post. One of the trends I think we’re witnessing with the publication Cornell paper is that, rather than the old techniques of sampling media coverage, we now have the tools to analyze the whole damn thing media system– in this case, 1.6 million mainstream media sites and blogs and 90 million articles. The value of this research is undeniable, and I expect it to become ever more common, because we a) have the tools to do this kind of work and b) don’t need “permission” from anyone to analyze their content.

It’s interesting to note that the New York Times article on the “meme-tracker”  study argues that “social scientists and media analysts have long examined news cycles, though focusing mainly on case studies instead of working with large Web data sets.” This is both true and not true. Indeed, its quite possible that research like the one carried out by the Cornell and Stanford researchers will become the academic norm, as I noted above. All the while, its harder and harder to get permission to go inside newsrooms, especially as the companies running them get ever more paranoid and bankrupt.  Like I noted earlier, I have not found a single article that analyzes the new dynamics news diffusion from inside the newsroom, even though the web revolution is more than 15 years old.

This is a problem, because if we rely solely on the quantitative number crunching of huge data sets, we’re going to miss a lot. As the Times article notes, “The Cornell research, like so much of the data mining on the Web, does raise the issue of whether something is necessarily significant just because it can be measured by a computer — especially when mouse clicks are assumed to represent broad patterns of human behavior.” And some of Rosenberg’s very cogent criticisms (that memes here are a stand-in for news, that distinguishing between blogs and the MSM is increasingly difficult if not impossible, that the study misses the actual interplay between the media and the “blogosphere”) lend themselves better to ethnographic study than computer driven analysis.

Going back and reading my paper next to the Leskovec et. al paper, its hard to imagine two more different studies. Theirs is 9 pages of densely paced analysis, math, and graphs. Mine is 30 sprawling pages of, well, mostly personal observations and quotes. And while this might seem to lead us back to the bad-old-world of perennial conflict between quantitative and qualitative research, I have hope that it won’t. As long as we value both kinds of research equally, and understand what they are and are not able to do, we ought to be fine. We should keep in mind, however, that rather than living in a world where ethnographic case study is common and quantitative crunching is rare, we might be approaching a world that is exactly the opposite.

In an ideal world, the kind of nuance that comes out of ethnographic analyses like the Francisville study will help serve as building blocks for richer, more complex quantitative work that can ask ever more interesting questions. Here’s hoping it does.

UPDATE: Video from the Gelf talk is now online and can be seen here. Obviously, the words below were meant to be read, and may come across a little oddly for that reason.

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Here’s the crib of the talk I gave in DUMBO last week:

Media Literacy and the “New” Journalism Education
Or, “Why J-School is Too Important to be Left to the Journalists”

C.W. Anderson

Every year, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism administers a “current affairs” test, which they say will test the “writing skill and general knowledge of current events.” It’s administered to every student applying to the school Why? Such a test seems trivial; it seems like giving a Jeopardy quiz to students who will be entering an Ivy League grad school.

My best guess is that this is test that determines whether you have an “ambient awareness” of the news. In other words, are you the kind of person who regularly consumes news content? Why might this matter? Just as you almost certainly can’t become a film director without watching film or a writer without reading literature, the most fundamental basic step to being a journalist is reading journalism. To be a good journalist, in short, being a news junkie helps.

In 2009, if I suddenly became god—if I were running the Columbia admissions program– what would I add to the current affairs test? I’d add something testing your “ambient awareness” of social media. Just as you could not be a journalist in 1989 without reading journalism, I’d argue that you can’t be a journalist in 2009 without producing, or at least consuming, social media, understanding how it works, what it can and cant do, what the current debates are about it, etc.

I admit that I haven’t thought much about what the questions would be on a test like this, but they might include:

(1) compare and contrast the use of twitter to talk about Michael Jackson vs the use of twitter to talk about Iran.
(2) What are some of the implications of the new Google operating system for social media, if any?
(3) What are some hey differences between Facebook and Myspace?

I think a test like this would, in large degree, put the rather silly debate about teaching fundamentals vs teaching “new technologies” on the level it belongs. On a low level. “Ambient knowledge” and acculturation to new media would be required before you get in to J-School, not after. Obviously, this test shouldn’t make or break your j-school application. There are a lot of things that are actually more important … but this could be one component.

By starting this talk by a discussion of the admissions test to a journalism graduate program, I’m marking out the territory I hope to cover tonight, which is the border zone between undergraduate education and either graduate school or a career. Part of my focus on this has to do with my personal trajectory. I graduated from Columbia University this spring with a PhD degree, and I will be starting at College of Staten Island – CUNY teaching journalism, media, and communications in the Fall. So a big question I’m wrestling with is this: “what can I teach my undergrads to get them on a path to either

a) get into a school like CUNY Grad, NYU, of CU? or
b) become good journalists without more school, or
c) become well-adjusted, productive participants in the media world, even if they never do a day of “traditional journalism” in their lives.

I think we often forget about the undergraduate aspect of j-school, especially in NYC, which is a home to some of the best upper-level and graduate journalism schools in the world. But think about this:  In 2007, there were 200,000 students enrolled in programs of journalism, media, and mass communications. Even before the collapse of the newspaper industry, it was clear that only a small fraction of these students were becoming “journalists” in any traditional sense. So what were they doing? A character from The Simpsons, Anton Lubchenko, once talked about journalism and communications degrees. And you can see the handiwork of the most famous not-so recent j-school grad here.

We wont begin to honestly address the relationship between journalism school and the problem of communication in the 21st century until we address the problem posed by Lubchenko: media and communication are to our era what the church was to the middle ages, it’s the container in which our consciousness is formed, but our literacy of it is trivial and often meaningless.

From the 1970’s through the 1990’s, the idea of “media literacy” was based around how to become a literate media consumer. The insight was that watching a lot of TV does not make you media literate … BUT also, as a professor who mostly reads books, you may not understand TV like your students do, and there needs to be a mutual sharing of expertise.

Now, we have to apply same lessons to world of infinite media production. Just because you use social media does not mean you have literacy in media production. BUT also, as a professor, you may not understand social media like your students do. Once again, there needs to be a mutual sharing of expertise.

What would it mean to teach basic media production literacy? Fortunately, many parts of the traditional journalism curriculum do this already. Take teaching the lede, for example. When I teach the lede to my students in my basic journalism classes – and it’s the first practical skill that I teach – what I usually do is give them a “notebook.” I tell them it’s their notebook from when they were out covering an event. And its usually got a ton of colorful information in it, and some boring but important quotes, and there are about 5 stories you could write from the notes, and some of the information contradicts.  And my assignment to them is, write a lede for your story coming out of this notebook.

Doing this exercise is both a lesson in how to journalism but also gets at some key aspects of how journalism works in a “media literate” sense. How might this exercise be adapted for the digital era? Well, you could add things to the exercise, for instance, what is a lede when the news is disaggregated and searchable? What is the relationship between a static news lede and the fluid world of social media?

All this is just an example of how media production literacy can overlap with basic journalism education. You’re learning how news gets produced, and how that production has changed over time.

All this has been rather abstract so far, so I want to sum up with a few concrete proposals about what journalism school needs to do to stay relevant. I haven’t had time to discuss all of these topics, so I’d be happy to take questions on them.

(1) Media production literacy should be the cornerstone of undergraduate programs in journalism and communication, and one aspect of this literacy should be an intelligent ambient awareness of the world of social media

(2) The focus of upper-level undergraduate and graduate programs in journalism should continue be: the gathering, evaluation, dissemination of publicly meaningful information …  but when an acculturation to social media operates in the background, what “gathering, evaluation, and dissemination” means starts to change. Many of the current debates about “teaching tech” vs teaching the fundamentals will seem odd or silly once this shift occurs.

(3) All graduate journalism education programs should require their students to minor / take classes in / form partnerships with other professionally-oriented schools, such as schools of international-public affairs, business school, computer programming. These partnerships should take the place of medium requirements currently in most schools (ie, magazine, newspaper, broadcast, etc). Indeed, I think out of all of these, a dual major in computer programming / journalism is a big part of the future. There is a new world out there for journalists who code and coders who can write / speak the language of journalism. Some schools are already doing this (Northwestern) and others should start.

A paradox of the current media moment is that, while journalism jobs are disappearing, j-school enrollment is up? Why? I believe its because people are curious about the media, practically oriented, and fundamentally want to both understand and contribute meaningfully to the world around them.  Over the next decade, fewer people may become “journalists” than ever before, but more people than ever will commit “acts of journalism.” To thrive, j-school must understand this and embrace it. Journalism school will stay relevant by training students to produce publicly meaningful content in a world of rampant media making, DIY content, and fragmentation.

Let me conclude with a deliberately provocative example to summarize my basic point. The last few Deans and Presidents of Columbia has all had an opinion about RW1, reporting and writing 1 the venerable core of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism education. In 2002, the current President of Columbia, Lee Bollinger, angered thousands of alumni along with the editorial page of the New York Times, when he said publicly that such a class was “unworthy” of an Ivy League University.  Other has poked and prodded RW1 in the past, without ever figuring out what to do with it.

My solution would be somewhat different. RW1, or something like it, should be a required class for every freshman entering Columbia. This doesn’t mean that the class is irrelevant; in fact, it means quite the opposite. It means that the fundamentals of what the entity formerly knows as j-school have to teach us are too important to be locked away and reserved only for journalists.