Entrepreneur Mark Cuban caused a bit of a stir earlier this month when he said that Google and other content aggregators essentially are vampires that suck the blood of the media. The only way to put a stop to it, Cuban added, was to "put a stake through their gosh darn hearts."
"You guys are always looking for the next thing to save you," he told media players at a conference in New York. "Your core competency is you create news, you create content. You just have to stop offering your necks to the vampires."
It was a good headline for a day or two on most media sites, and the comments drew some fascinating critiques because Cuban is an investor in Mahalo, which leans heavily on aggregation to create content for its own website. Other than the particularly harsh language, there also was nothing new about the complaint. We've heard a similar story from Rupert Murdoch, Sam Zell, and a host of other people in traditional media who want to put pay walls up to prevent their content from being stolen.
But the essential question remains: Are aggregators really thieves?
Truth is, most media brands work very hard to get their work distributed. In my earlier years at Forbes magazine, we had a team of three full-time publicists who worked behind-the-scenes to get media pickup of stories, book writers and editors on radio and television shows, and get the brand maximum exposure. This was also true at BusinessWeek which had (and still has) it's own in-house public relations staff, as well as an external firm to promote BW journalism to prominent bloggers and other media organizations.
As long as aggregators credit the source and even link back to the original content, how is that any different than a media brand's own attempts to gain wider distribution of its stories through PR agents?
Newser, meantime, takes an entirely different approach. It produces no original content, other than the blogged opinions of founder and provocateur Michael Wolf. Everything else is largely a short and snappy two-paragraph rewrite of the day's most entertaining news. Wolf is candid about what he's doing: The "About" section for the site reports that "Newser is a news aggregator with brains. We select the best news stories from hundreds of sources all over the web, read them for you, and summarize them in two succinct, sharply written paragraphs or less." It's stock market coverage on a recent day, posted 35 minutes after the market's close, was a graf and three bullet points, all taken from The Wall Street Journal, which posted its account just 16 minutes earlier. A "review" of the new movie "Blood Done Sign My Name" opens with two short sentences followed by four grafs stolen from four reviews published by The Philadelphia Enquirer, New York Post, Variety, and Chicago Sun-Times. There are links to the original stories in all of these files--if you want them. So Newser not only credits the source, it essentially sends traffic to their sites—at least for the readers who want the full stories.
All of this is perfectly legal, falling within the rules of fair use. But is it ethical or moral? After all, Newser and other aggregators are profit-making enterprises whose business models are essentially dependent on the investment of billions of dollars to produce the content they steal.
I don’t believe its unethical and here’s why: 1) At least in the above examples, there is total transparency to what is going on, 2) The original source is given credit for the article, and 3) The aggregator provides highlighted ink sback to the original content, driving revenue-producing traffic back to the source.
This isn’t exactly what my high school English teacher would call plagiarism. Rather, it’s fulfilling the same aims of a publication’s PR department: getting wider distribution of content to enhance a brand’s image so that more readers will likely either buy the publication or go to its website. Whether those goals are achieved is another story.
What do you think?
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11 comments:
This topic came up at the last session of the Hacks and Hackers meetup in San Francisco (http://hackshackers.com). This group brings together journalists and techies who work on related projects. The discussion got pretty heated, and one of the panelists gave an answer very similar to yours - aggregators help publishers spread their content. A bigger question is how aggregators can help journalists to get paid for their work.
John,
Gotta take issue with you on this. If aggregators only took snippets, leading readers back to the news source, it would be fine. That would amount to fair use and promotion. And news sources would then gain eyeballs at their sites for advertising or, one might hope, to take out paid subscriptions.
Problem is, the information has all become free. No one has to pay for the product of the labors of all those journos. As a result, the ranks of journos are thinning fast. Would you produce a book if you couldn't sell it? Would you want an aggregator to put it out there for nothing?
It's simple economics really. Provide a good for nothing and soon the good will be worth nothing. Moreover, no one will be providing material of value. What will the aggregators then have to peddle?
JW
Joe,
Fair enough. I think in the cases I mention at HuffPo, Daily Beast, and Newser, they are taking not much more than two paragraphs with full credit and a link to the original source. Does that constitute a snippet? What we don't really know is how much revenue-generating traffic comes back to the source. My guess is not much because most of the users of these sites are probably scanners--especially of aggregation--and not true readers. But the aggregators do help some users find stories they might otherwise never discover and that would certainly lead to hits on the original site.
Best,
John
I won't read them. I want the original thinking of the journalists/teacher.
"Take a look at three major players who smartly use aggregation as a part of their business models: The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, and Newser."
I think what happens easily is that 2 distinct phenomena are lumped together, and that is why there is so much argument: people simply don't agree on what it is they're talking about (in a way quite reminiscent of William James' example of the "squirrel going around the tree").
The 2 things that nead to be considered separately are:
1. Citing an article in order to promote further discussion about a topic
2. Wholesale acquisition of freely available content in order to resell it (and/or sell advertising "next to" it).
I have argued about a year ago that the entire model of selling advertising NEXT TO "content" is becoming outdated at a quite rapid rate ( see http://snurl.com/link-advertising-free ). But above and beyond this, I would argue that whereas most would agree that situations similar to #1 above are OK, any case similar to #2 would generally be disputed or simply vehemently contested (as is the case with Rupert Murdoch objecting to Google's scraping of NewsCorp content).
But aside from such objections as to whether such wholesale copying and reselling is objectionable or not, my main issue is: Who, besides perhaps imbecilic numskulls, would actually WANT to search through "all the worlds data"? Searching through such an undifferentiated potpourri of apples and oranges which have been trucked and dumped into one big gigantic cesspool is only going to lead to "garbage in, garbage out" (GIGO) results.
Indeed, people are already voting with their feet. If they want to hear the latest commercial buzz, they'll search twitter.com. If they want to connect with friends and acquaintances, they'll visit facebook.com. Many more such sites exist, each with a different community focus (and likewise: businesses also engage in such "social" [or targeted community] networks in order to reach a specific target audience with more/less well defined interests).
In my opinion, branded content sites (such as NYT or WSJ) are no longer quite as relevant as what is happening in these more topically focused communities (and this is - by the way - exactly the area where I am most actively engaged ;). The reason why people do not pay attention to one-size fits-all search engines is quite simple: the results the spit out are garbage.
:) nmw
Interesting comments all. I agree with Norbert that it's important to really identify the terms of this debate (I think his #2 is what the fuss is about).
"Curating" others content has always been around. One of the highest circ pubs for a while -- Reader's Digest -- was an offline version. To John's point about content creators working hard for publicity, I doubt there were many authors complaining about the added exposure they got from Reader's Digest. The Week does this now in print as well. It seems that if an organization can generate traffic and enough revenue to sustain itself by curating and presenting content via fair use then it's a market validation. I guess the real questions is does "fair use" need to be updated or violations enforced? Is there something wrong with fair use itself, or is it just a traumatic period in which many good people see their careers upended and because technology is disrupting and changing media and so arguing for tighter fair use restrictions becomes a club to fight back with?
To Josepha's point, there is no question that the economics of the model are broken as the researchers/reporters/creators can't monetize their efforts. But I don't see how there is a solution other than letting the market sort out which original content people find enough "value" in to support. There is no built in right (or perhaps even need) for a local paper to cover a local sports event -- especially if a local site "aggregates" fan uploads (photos, text, comments, video) so that the event is covered for "free" other than the tech costs to maintain the portal. And some of the web properties around New Haven that provide interactive maps letting citizens post potholes and street light outages are another example of harnessing UGC to replace a previous paid staffer.
The trickier part I think is replacing the institutional role media "companies" played in the overall national conversation and governance. With the loss of strong organizations (with well funded legal departments and access to research tools), there is a loss of counterweight to corporate and government corruption and mismanagement. The government attempt to intimidate and arrest a blogger after release of new internal TSA guidelines after the Christmas bombing attempt is one example. That loss will be felt, and is in my mind, the greatest negative to the changing media landscape.
As the CEO and foudner of www.TV1.com, a start up site that hopes to eventually aggregate a lot of web video content by providing easy tools for any user to create video blogs from their own video or video stored or served anywhere else, I have a vested interest in answering that many aggregators are not thieves. I would view aggregators as thieves if they stripped out ads and put their own in, or embedded/duplicated video content that was not intended to be embedded. This would amount to intellectual property piracy, which is a form of thievary.
But this is only a partial answer. What of The Huffington Post and Daily Beat "snippets," that piggy-back on the hundreds of millions that news orgs like the NYT spends to create content?
I am a big fan of the Huffington Post (and Ariana as well); I read it constantly; it's a big radar screen for me on issues and media that's in many other places. I am constantly clicking through to articles on other sites that I would otherwise not have seen. This brings traffic to those sites that they would otherwise not have had.
I like the Fair Use Doctrine, and applying this to online aggregation. It is a service I appreciate when an aggregator paraphrases or provides a sense of what the story is about, and lets me decide whether I want the full story, or to move on to another one.
Mr. Byrne,
It's interesting that I found your blog while searching for your contact information. This is an interesting entry, and actually is sort of the reason I'm looking for you!
I'm an assistant editor at a reference publisher in New York. We have been around for over 100 years and have a database of hundreds of thousands of articles. We're an Aggregator, but much more traditional (like EBSCO, etc.)
So, back to why I'm looking for you. We publish a series of books that contain reprinted articles. This time around the book is about the news media. The editor found a great article you wrote in the Christian Science Monitor (http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2008/0908/p09s02-coop.html). We want to reprint it, but you own the rights!
The editors gave me your BusinessWeek e-mail address, but that's defunct. And so I'm going new school to try and find you and see if you'd like to give us the permission to reprint this article. We'd be willing to pay a fee, and of course credit you and the source. And we do not intend to change the content at all!
I can definitely give you more information--just let me know!
Cheers!
John,
This is a hefty discussion, but when it comes down to it I would prefer to deliver the best news resources possible - unique and/or aggregated - based on the needs of my readers. Aggregation helps sites covering a vast area stay local and provide more value to individual users.
I'd be interested to hear what you think of a site like FanFeedr.com, a real-time personalized sports feed. It aggregates news, tweets, video and scores for your favorite players and teams, creating a personalized news feed for each user.
Thanks!
When I read the out-lier arguments exposed, I realize why the media in general has been so late in realizing how aggregators exploit them --it's a difficult subject, technology has allowed aggregators to place a dark veil over the media's eyes.
But, blood sucking it is.
To begin with, it's illegal. Fair use exceptions to copyright law are allowed as long as the source does not suffer damage...
On one hand, we have that aggregators duplicate the supply of advertising space for each piece of aggregated content. On the other, we have that advertisers have no reason to increase their budget, or that the demand for advertising remains constant. We all know what an increase in supply means with a constant demand: ad prices drop. If you don't believe me ask around.
Then we also have that readers reach online sites either through laser focused searches or because they trust the brand of the site, and have a bookmark reach.
It's easy to see how the piggybacking of aggregators to publish a selection of free content from various news sources, grinds away day after day the brand of a news source.
Most aggregator traffic buildup is unfairly gained at the expense of the news source brand deterioration.
I've never seen the WS Journal select and publish news from the Washpo nor the NY Times. It's an unfair advantage to publish an aggregated edition with the best of the litter.
It sure looks like damage to me.
John is absolutely right about this. Otherwise, why don't Rupert Murdoch and others exercise their right to opt out of Google News? they know it brings traffic to their site.
The problem journalists face is that real news sites haven't figured out how to make money for online content. Paid subscriptions are not an option. Any article the Wall Street Journal publishes behind its paid wall can be found elsewhere.
The solution is the same revenue source all news organizations have relied on for a hundred years: ADVERTISING. They just don't do it properly. they think they can still use the offline model of irrelevant banner ads, with the added twist that they shove them in our faces with pop-ups and annoying multimedia features that they think will get us to read their junk. In email, that's called spam. We need to take a lesson from Google and offer ads that are relevant to the reader. Then we'll be just fine.
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