Why the Marburger Plan to Save Newspapers Won't Actually Save Newspapers

Yesterday we looked over the so-called Marburger proposal to allow newspapers (and presumably other content providers) to sue news aggregators for unjust enrichment. Since that post I've seen a couple others talking about monopoly of information, so I say again -- the Marburger plan would only protect reporter work product, not the information itself. If a reporter can obtain the same information independently, the cause of action should fail. (Accent on should -- the Marburgers do not entertain the possibility that the cause of action will drift and morph beyond what they envision, but that's another post.)

Before we get started on the problems with the proposal, a couple of caveats. First off, what I know about the newspaper business is what I read. Same with some internet use patterns. The difference between what lies below and what the Marburgers have done is that I have paid attention to things they haven't. Again I restate my central objection -- the Marburgers prove propositions with thought experiments that should be tested with data.

Finally a couple of links that got left off of yesterday's post. First off, Editor and Publisher covers the proposal, but with no critical comment. New media guy Marc Cantor weighs in with ideas about what the newspapers themselves can do to maintain an audience. (h/t Brewed Fresh.) A piece from the UK looks at the Marburger plan in the context of the far more draconian proposal from Judge Richard Posner to give papers intellectual property rights over their links. And if you really wanna get geeky wit it, here's a Coase Theorem treatment of the Posner idea. There has also been more dogpiling on Connie Schultz from various blogs. You can look through the links in yesterday's post and extrapolate if you really want to see more of that sort of thing.

Now on to the show.

Marburger Cures the Wrong Disease.

My biggest objection to Marburger (for want of another name, this is what we'll call it) is that it assumes that the gravest threat to newspapers is losing readers. While papers have lost readers steadily throughout the Twentieth Century due to competing media (radio was killing off papers long before the internets) the precipitous drop in revenues has happened on the advertising side.

Advertisers have been migrating steadily to online sources that have nothing to do with newspapers. This is particularly true of classified advertising which has traditionally been an indespensible revenue stream for newspapers -- up to 70% of profits. Craigslist has done the most damage, but Monster, Cars.com and for that matter Ebay have all taken away business that newspapers once dominated. As a result, classified revenues have dropped by half since 2000. Analysts like Lauren Rich Fine (that's the source of the 70% figure) have been warning for years that newspapers cannot survive ad revenue losses of this magnitude.

Online classified services offer advantages that newspapers cannot match. If you are paying for a newspaper classified, you are subsidizing that news gathering operation whose expense the Marburgers so persuasively described. Your cost is based on total circulation, despite the fact that only a tiny percentage of those readers are likely to have any interest in your ad. With online classifieds, on the other hand, every pair of eyes that wanders into the site is at least in the market for something along the lines of what you want to advertise. No one goes onto Cars.com to read about Michael Jackson's kids. They go to buy a car.

(By the way I have a theory that computer-based advertizing is a general danger to both content providers and content consumers. Advertizing is generally really inefficient. Again only a tiny percentage of whoever sees an ad has an interest in the subject of the ad. As computerization allows greater targeting, advertizing becomes more efficient. The more efficient it is, the less businesses have to buy it.)

Marburger does nothing about the loss of classified advertising. By their admission, they are talking about marginal increases in traffic. But traffic doesn't matter if it doesn't attract advertizing.

Curing the Wrong Disease, Part 2 -- Problems in Monitizing Websites.

The Marburgers would no doubt object that online ad pricing is dictated by traffic, which is true. But its not like newspaper website advertising was profitable, then the profits started to erode due to unfair competition from aggregators.

The fact is that it's really difficult to sell enough advertising to support web-based journalism. There isn't as much real estate on a web page (versus print where, among other things, you have facing pages that don't have an analog online). And people can block ads. And web advertising is still working to overcome a past rife with charlatans (remember the commercial about the poor sap who shot the duck in the banner ad?)

And of course news organizations are competing with sites that allow better targeting (see above.)

Over time, changes in technology may make monitizing online content easier (the rise in video allows commercials that you can't fwd past) or harder (written content on mobile web allows pretty much no space for ads). But between the loss of advertizing to other providers and the basic difficulty of paying for journalism with online ads, the newspapers are facing an inevitable decline that tinkering with intellectual property will not fix.

That said, the free rider effect that the Marburgers identify is the sort of thing that lawyers should seek a remedy for. Whether the Marburgers have correctly identified that effect and whether their proposal would provide an adequate remedy is another question.

The Marburger Proposal to "Save Newspapers" Round up and Initial Thoughts

Connie Schultz began what is rapidly becoming a national conversation about the economic future of newspapers with her Sunday column about a proposal by the brothers Marburger. Daniel is an economist at Arkansas State University, David is a partner at Baker Hostetler who represents newspapers, including the PD.

You can find a pdf of the proposal on the "blog" version of the column.

The default blogger reaction has been to hate on this mercilessly. Of course any time Connie Schultz ventures anywhere near blog world, Tim Russo's melon explodes, so the Marburger plan has taken over #JamesRenner among Russo Trending Topics. But other negative reaction has been nearly as intemperate from Jeff Jarvis, Anastasia at ODB, Mediactive, you get the idea. Some reaction has been a bit more measured and some has been borderline positive, but overall, it hasn't gone well.

I also have problems with the proposal, but since the haters have had their vein-bulging, spit-flying fun, I will try to break things down a little more soberly. Not as much fun, I know, but the proposal raises real issues that merit serious discussion. And let's face it, I'm generally the wet blanket at the hater party.

So. Let's start with what the proposal is. And isn't.

Aggregation Aggravation.

The Marburger proposal takes aim at news aggregators, in particular those they call "parasitic aggregators." The Marburgers begin with the assumption that some news aggregators summarize and rewrite reporting from online newspaper sites, and by doing so skim some would-be visitors to the site that did the actual reporting to put that information online. Whether this actually happens is highly questionable, but let's leave it for now. I know you want to stop and yell and scream about strawman scenarios, but seriously, let's lay this out before we pick it apart.

The problem is that copyright protection traditionally protects expression, not information. So while it would violate copyright to simply reproduce news stories verbatim, it does not violate copyright to write up the information into a new story.

So assuming aggregators are actually taking eyes away from newspaper site, they are doing so using the work product of newspaper reporters. The Marbugers spend a large chunk of their 51 pages making the case that because doing journalism is labor intensive and expensive and aggregating is relatively cheap, that aggregators work at a comparative advantage that will eventually drive newspapers under.

While the argument that aggregators are cheaper to run than news sites is well-established, the authors also claim that the loss of traffic to aggregators is a big reason newspapers cannot monitize their website traffic. This part of the argument they extrapolate from their talk of aggregators. It is entirely data-free. Indeed, to preview one blanket criticism of the paper, the authors engage largely in thought experiments to establish propositions that should be testable by examining actual data.

The Unjust Enrichment Solution.

In the early days of the teletype (1918) the AP successfully sued to prevent a competitor from rewriting its stories and selling them to newspapers. The case went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court and according to the Marburgers (I haven't researched it directly yet) won under a theory of unjust enrichment pursuant to what was then called Federal common law. The Court has since declared that there is in fact no Federal common law and that instead, a Federal court not deciding a case under a Federal statute has to choose some state's common law under which to decide. Bear that in mind when we talk about problems with the proposal, a post or two down the line.

Unjust enrichment is a well-established common law doctrine. Basically it means you can't profit from someone else's work. In law school we mostly study it under contract law. If two parties do not agree to a contract but one mistakenly starts doing work, the party that profits from that work can't refuse to pay because the contract wasn't finalized.

After the AP case, the particular strain of unjust enrichment enshrined there was referred to as the "hot news" doctrine. Importantly, the doctrine limited the use of information contained in a "hot" news story, but did not prevent enterprising reporters tipped off by a story from going out and doing their own reporting on it.

Problem is copyright law is a federal statute and federal laws generally preempt state laws. During a 1980s rewrite of copyright laws, Congress explicitly stated that state law remedies for copyright violation are preempted; copyright is the exclusive remedy for violations.

The Marburger proposal reverses that decision. Copyright law would be rewritten to allow state law claims for unjust enrichment. The individual states would then thrash out what constitutes unjust enrichment, what the remedies are and so forth. While commentators have called it an expansion or tightening of copyright, it isn't. It is more of copyright-plus regime, where the plus is the "hot news" unjust enrichment doctrine.

The Marburger proposal is neither benign toward First Amendment freedoms, nor the total squelching of those freedoms some critics have claimed. It is not the information land grab some have predicted, but it does expand rights to control of information under very limited circumstances. In sum, the proposal will benefit newspapers and put some burdens on other content providers, though the extent of those burdens would have to be hashed out in court.

Given the problems/burdens attendent in the proposal, my biggest problem with it is that it will not work. We'll take that up in the next post.

Following the Recall Results

The best online place to be is Akron News Now which has a live feed from the newsroom. It's kind of cool -- you can see anchor Lindsay McCoy gathering info from online and from the BoE and relaying it to on-air talent. A bit of behind-the-scenes.

One thing we learn from Lindsay is that the online BoE updates are more current than what the reporters at the BoE can get from staff there (having done voter protection duty at BoE, it's not surprising. At this time of night, the main BoE office is essentially vacant as everyone is in back processing the ballots.) As such, you can keep an eye on the BoE page by loading it and refreshing it every couple of minutes.

As of now (around 8:30) the Board shows 48% reporting, the results are 76.85 against the recall to 23.15 for. The trend line has been slightly toward narrowing that enormous gap. At around 8 the first 12 percent of precints showed an 80/20 split.

UPDATE 8:36 56% in, still 3-1 advantage for Plusquellic. ANN is calling it against the recall. Fascinating to see how manifestly unscientific the "call" decision is. Also, ANN is Twittering the results under hashtag #akronrecall

UPDATE 10:20 It's official -- Change Akron Now got boatraced. 74%-26%. Akron News Now signed off their live feed, but the recall page now features an interview with Mendenhall in which he confirms that his group will try to field candidates in all the city council races and that his wife Kelly is running for council at large. He also whines that he didn't have any money to run the campaign. Of course if people agreed with the recall they would give money, but . . .

Some recall results fun facts:

The received wisdom was that pro-recall voters would certainly vote and that the election would be close if turnout was low. Well turnout was low -- 21% -- and the recall still got crushed. That means either the pro-recall folks weren't significantly more motivated than anyone else (possible) or that there just aren't that many of them (more likely.)

At a total vote of 7325, Team Mulligan didn't even double up the 3800 some-odd valid petition signatures. That is, if everyone who signed the petition voted and brought a friend to vote, they would have exceeded the total actually garnered by 275 votes.

At 20895 the anti-recall vote is 30% higher than the 15895 he got in the uncontested general election in 2007.

Law Dork pwns Time Magazine

Yesterday the Supreme Court decided against hearing on appeal a challenge to the military's Don't Ask/Don't Tell policy. So first off, a pox on every headline writer who announced that the Court "upheld" the policy. One of the first things you learn in law school is that the Court declining to hear an appeal (denying certiorari in lawyerspeak) is not the same as upholding the result below. Often the Court just doesn't feel the case isn't the best for deciding the issue.

Chris Geidner blogging at Law Dork explained this and more, including what he calls the "odd background posture" of the case:

Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, a legal group dedicated to supporting lesbian and gay soldiers, had been involved in this case, originally representing the 12 individuals challenging the policy. The organization, however, was no longer representing James Pietrangelo when he sought certiorari. SLDN continued to represent the other 11 individuals and filed a brief opposing having the Court accept this case.

Chris goes on to note that Pietrangelo then tried to have the SLDN brief in opposition struck from the record. Reading between the lines, Pietrangelo comes off as a bit of a loose cannon.

For a little broader context, consider the dissent among gay activists over the high profile suit challenging California's Prop 8 gay marriage ban. Again, just reading this from afar it appears that gay activists are seeing greater chances of success (and of minimizing backlash) by securing legislative victories as opposed to court challenges.

Enter Time Magazine. They've posted a story headlined "Dismay Over Obama's Turnabout on 'Don't Ask Don't Tell.' Who is dismayed? Well, the entire story consists of Pietrangelo hurling invective at Obama. Not one recognized leader of the gay community is quoted. If Chris Geidner, a blogger in flyover country (though granted an extremely well-read and well-connected one) understands the backstory of the case, why can't Time at least offer a little balancing perspective before winding Pietrangelo up and watching him go?

But no worries. This post will soon hit my Twitter feed. And that will change everything.

Coughlin v. Renner and NY Times v. Sullivan

While the blogosphere has been tittering about whether State Sen. Kevin Coughlin dallied with a staffer, some of us have been wondering why an alleged libel suit threat could possibly have spiked the story.

If you are late to the story, Scene Magazine reporter James Renner was fired last week for his reaction to news that his editor and publisher were burying a story alleging that Coughlin was having an affair with an identified former staffer. Renner sent the story to Tim Russo who published it. Professor Idontlink at Pol. Sci. 216 has also picked up the story and followed up with more detail from Renner

According to Renner's story posted on BI, Scene decided to kill the story after getting letters from Sen. Coughlin's attorney threatening a libel suit if the story went to press. The posted story also details Renner's reporting which includes interviewing multiple and an entertaining attempt to secure comment from Coughin's alleged paramour.

Based on the facts as presented by Renner, Scene's action is inexplicable. Coughlin is a public figure. As such any libel action he brings would have to meet the high constitutional standard set by the Supreme Court in New York Times v. Sullivan. The Court held that:

The constitutional guarantees require, we think, a federal rule that prohibits a public official from recovering damages for a defamatory falsehood relating to his official conduct unless he proves that the statement was made [280] with "actual malice"--that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.

Recall that Renner says he has the roommate of alleged Coughlin squeeze on tape verifying the affair, plus other witnesses, put squeeze's patently evasive response to an interview request. Put it together and Coughlin has a nearly impossible task of proving that Renner was reckless.

And the Sullivan standard assumes that allegations in a story are false and therefore defamatory. If the allegations are true, Scene also wins. The Sullivan actual malice requirement offers news organizations a way to avoid the long, expensive business of proving truth. Which in a way is a pity as (from what I've heard) the defense would be able to put together a long and impressive witness list.

Scene management knows (or at least should know) all of the above. Their abject surrender to Coughlin is puzzling.

Akron Press Club: The State of Ohio's Newspapers Panel

The next program at the Akron Press Club will be a panel discussion featuring the Editors of three major Ohio newspapers. While they will discuss the state of the news business generally, one item high on the agenda will be the Ohio News Organization, a collaboration through which major papers buy stories from one another.

The panelists will be Bruce Winges from the Akron Beacon Journal, Susan Goldberg from the Plain Dealer and Jeff Gauer from the Canton Repository.

I had a hand in putting this one together and am pretty excited about it. Info and contact for reservations here.

The Good and the Bad in Dispatch Election Analysis

Like it or not, the Columbus Dispatch is the paper of record when it comes to statewide politics. Between some political reporters and the natural proximity to politics central, the paper will run more stories and have more statewide information than anyone else.

The Good.

The best Dispatch post-mortem so far is a story analyzing Obama's 88-county strategy. The story doesn't stop at the obvious (scoreboard; it worked.) Instead the writers dig through the numbers to show that the strategy paid off. Obama improved Kerry's performance in most regions throughout the state, winning some new counties in the northwest and blunting the Republican advantage on its home turf. Moreover, the paper notes that Obama actually underperformed Kerry in Appalachian counties and in the Mahoning valley.

Click. Read. The whole article is worth the time.

The Bad.

The headline alone tells you we're heading off the tracks: "As Usual, Dispatch Poll Was Accurate." As usual? Do you guys remember any of your earlier polls? Or are we engaging in a bit of revisionist history.

Let's review. As accurately noted, the Dispatch poll showed a dead heat in 2004 just before the election which was in the MoE of Bush's two percent win. But a month before, the Dispatch poll was an outlier, showing a seven percent Bush lead when the average of Ohio polls showed two percent.

The next year, the Dispatch suffered a humiliating stumble, predicting victory for two of the four Reform Ohio Now amendments before all four were crushed at the polls.

In '06 the poll showed Strickland ahead by six and a half points more than his ultimate margin of victory and was, again, the only poll to do so. For a poll that claims a 2% MoE, that's ugly. By the way, the RON poll and the '06 gov poll were so far of that they gave Fitrakis fodder for his usual moonbattery.

Happily, no significant statewide races last year offered the paper a chance to issue a meaningful poll.

"As usual" it was accurate? A better headline would have been "Dispatch Poll Fails to Embarass the Paper This Time."

LMJ's Fact-Free Editorial

The Lorain Morning Journal runs an editorial today -- not a wingnut-penned op-ed, mind, but an editiorial -- rehashing the charge that Obama wants to turn the Constitution into Das Kapital. Here's the nut:

With less than a week remaining before Election Day, it seems to us that the real October surprise of 2008 is how little serious attention is being paid to the genuine and profoundly disturbing statements by Barack Obama himself. Specifically, Obama's "spread the wealth" admission to Joe the Plumber and most especially to an interview Obama did on Chicago public radio several years ago in which he basically dismisses the U.S. Constitution as a flawed document because it only talks about protecting citizens from the government and does not specify what the government "must" do for citizens. His words create the distinct impression that under an Obama presidency, federal judges and Supreme Court justices appointed by Obama would be encouraged to reinterpret the Constiution and to go beyond its words in ways that would result in a whole new concept of what the United States of America is about. Although Obama's delivery of these concepts was as cool and dispassionate as ever, the real-life social impact of such reinventing of the Constitution would surely be so red-hot as to make the word "radical" totally inadequate.

Problem. Obama didn't say that. More to the point, he said the opposite. You can find a transcript on the Fox News site of all places and follow along. (By the way, I've cleaned up the transcription a bit.) First off, here's the bit that Limbaugh et al use to make the charge:

I mean if you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy and the court I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples so that I would not have the right to vote would now be able to sit at lunch counter and as lpong as I could pay for it would be ok but the supreme court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of basic issues of political and economic justice.

OK, stop right there. Not because that completes Obama's thought, but because the wingers using this interview stop there. I unfortunately ran across Rush declaiming on this earlier this week. He stops the tape here and says, "He regrets this. He thinks this is a bad thing." With no actual evidence or anything.

So here's the rest of that graf:

in this society and to that extent as radical as people try to characterize the warren court it wasn't that radical it didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the constitution at least as it has been interpreted and the warren court interpreted it generally in the same way that the constitution is a document of negative liberties says what the states cant do to you says what the federal govt cant do to you but it doesn't say what the federal govt or state govt must do on your behalf and that hasn't shifted and i think one of the tragedies of the civil rights movement was that the civil rights movement became so court focused i think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and organizing activities on the ground that are able to bring about the coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change and in some ways we still suffer from that.

There's a lot here -- about latter day critics of the Warren Court, about the difference between positive and negative rights. It's all heavily academic. The key for our purposes is the last bit where Obama says that the court successes lulled the movement into relying too much on litigation and not enough on political organization. That doesn't sound like someone who wants to write redistribution into the Constitution but the opposite -- someone who thinks questions of economic policy should be left to the political process.

Not enough? Try this from later in the interview:

You know maybe I am showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor but you know I am not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts you know the institution just isn't structured that way just look at very rare examples where during he desegregation era the court was willing to for example order you know changes that cost money to local school district and the court was very uncomfortable with it it was hard to manage it was hard to figure out you start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues you know in terms of the court monitoring or engaging in a process that is essentially is administrative and take a lot of time the court is not very good at it and politically it is hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard so I think that although you can craft theoretical justifications for it legally you know I think any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts I think that as a practical matte that our institutions are just poorly equipped to do it.

So, an interview in which Obama says that using courts to redistribute wealth is used to prove he intends to use courts to redistribute wealth. One wonders if the LMJ actually read the transcript, or if they just heard the Fox/Limbaugh snippet. In their summing up, the paper says:

Do not brush off this admonition as an empty scare tactic from a newspaper that has endorsed John McCain.

Fair enough. Instead let's brush it off as an empty scare tactic from a newspaper that can't be bothered to do basic reporting.

UPDATE: I'm off my game. I forgot to h/t my tweep Olevia for the tip.

UPDATE 2: Olevia points out that I forgot to link to the piece. And I forgot the link for the transcript. Really really off my game. Links are updated above. Also if you want to know more about the negative/positive rights issue alluded to above, Prof. Will Huhn has a good explanation on Akron Law Cafe.

Plain Dealer Among Papers Teaming with Politico

From Editor and Publisher:

Politico, the online political news site, has launched a new content sharing network that will provide news items to other news outlets -- including several newspapers -- in exchange for ad placements on their sites, the Web site revealed Tuesday.

In an announcement, Politico states that it has partnered with Adify, a vertical ad network management company, to launch the Politico Network. Through the new venture, media organizations selected by Politico editors will have access to the site's top stories for use online and in print.

"The Politico Network also brings a new revenue model to these media partners: Politico will sell national advertising to be placed on partners’ websites, and revenue from those ads will be shared between Politico and the media outlets," the release stated.

Among those news outlets already signed up for the network are The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Denver Post, and The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Politico stated.

In fairly short order Politico has become a journalistic force, though who knows how the economics look. The received wisdom at the time of launch was that Politico needed a viable print counterpart to survive. This may be a way to accomplish that.

News organizations are working on all sorts of content/ad revenue sharing models as the economics of news gathering shift and tighten. The value of an outfit like Politico is that it can serve multiple segments simultaneously. They report the deep minutiae for us political junkies, but can synthesize that into more reader-friendly stories for normal people.

Craig Simpson: D'Oh!

Craig Simpson is a reporter on the Rubber City Radio stations and a frequent guest on Eric Mansfield's NewsNight Akron. Now he also runs a blog and last week posted about Akron's JCC hosting Maccabi Games, a Jewish youth athletic event. The post is, ah, problematic and Jill pointed it out. In response to comments from Jill and I, Craig says he's only kidding.

Actually, he says he was kidding and that some of his best friends are Jewish and that if anyone is offended, he's sorry. Yes, the Lighten Up crackback, the My Best Friends defense and the If You Were Offended non-apology apology. The three favorites of people who say stupid crap and won't own it. A trifecta of douchebaggery. Well played, sir.

Oh, and he tells me to be a real man. So apparently my offense has to do with my lousy bench press, or something.

*Sigh*

We shouldn't have to keep having this conversation, but apparently we must. So here are a few tips for navigating the treacherous straights between effective satire and actually trafficking in hate. And I'll type slowly so even Craig can understand.

First off, people have to know you are kidding. No, really. Because, you see, the reason that these stereotypes are so powerful and destructive is that people actually say them and mean them. And mean harm by them. By this measure Simpson's post fails. He starts off arguing that Jews shouldn't sequester themselves from the rest of society for exclusive activities. This is a stock Limbaughian rant. Without knowing whether Simpson is actually Limbaughian, it's impossible to know that he's kidding.

Then he segues into a bit about what interfaith games might look like. This is painfully unfunny but at least it looks like it's supposed to be funny.

Then the head-snapping last paragraph:

Come on, the Jews have most of the money and run most of the business world…do you REALLY need to rub it in our faces have your own freakin’ Olympics!? Just stick to penny-pinching, lawyering and filling up the upscale communities in America’s suburbs.

I'll wait until you recover from the spasms of laughter.

There.

This, apparently, is where he goes so over the top that he thinks anyone would know he was kidding, Would that it were so. In fact I know intelligent professional people who think think nothing of trafficking in the standard money-grubbing Jew stereotype.

In his defense Craig maintains that his Jewish friends thought this was all Big Laffs. Setting aside the real possibility that his friends were just being abundantly polite to their ignorant but harmless goy friend, this argument still falls. His friends have a context for knowing that he's kidding -- the context of knowing Craig Simpson. Without that context it looks like he started a standard right wing diatribe and in the last paragraph shared too much.

Which brings us to a second problem. If you are going to satirize hateful stereotypes, actually satirize them. Just reiterating them isn't satire. Simpson is engaging in the Andrew Dice Clay method -- pretend to be a bigot by actually sounding like a bigot, but do nothing to make the bigotry sound ridiculous. In the Diceman's case, the satire claim was just window dressing to make his actually bigotry look something close to respectable, but his audience was laughing at the objects of his rants, not with them. In Simpson's case, it just turns out to be not funny, unless you share the actual views he posts.

By the same token, understand that if you are satirizing, you are still trotting out ideas that hurt people. It's a project you should approach with some delicacy.

Finally, if you try this and it doesn't work, admit it. I've worked this line myself -- in the immediately preceding post in fact. It's easy to make a mistake and hurt people. Where I come from, a big part of being a real man is to admit when you've made a mistake. And no, "I'm sorry you were too sensitive to know I was kidding" is not actually an apology, it's an insult.

Looking over Simpson's work, it doesn't look like he has the chops to thread this needle. Stick to sounding smarter that Phil Trexler, Craig. It's about as high as you can aspire to.

CNN Expanding News Ops to C-Bus

Reuters is reporting that the cable news channel is expanding (it sounds more like decentralizing) its news gathering operation into twenty new cities, including Columbus. From the article, it sounds like this is not a bureau in the traditional sense, but something new and tech-driven:

CNN will hire a handful of new employees, while reassigning some current employees to new jobs. The goal is to have a mix of traditional network correspondents and what CNN calls "all-platform journalists" or APJs, who gather news using lightweight kits that include laptops, cameras and editing tools for Internet as well as on-air programming in all 20 cities.

As both a news consumer and an aspiring content provider (not necessarily to the CNNs of the world, but generally) this sounds like a potentially exciting development.

Interesting h/t for the story. I've been on Twitter for about a month now. As you stay on the service, media organizations that Twitter begin to "Follow" you basically as a means of proclaiming their existence. Today I got notice that something called CAMediaGuide was following me. Clicking through I found a news aggregator with a horrible design -- a rejected-by-Matt-Drudge level of horrible -- but some useful content. Not interested in California, but more clicking revealed an Ohio Media Guide. Still borderline unreadable on screen, but pretty useful as a Twitterer. So I Followed and got the tweet this afternoon.

It took a long time to warm up to Twitter, but so far it has been a useful tool.

MSM Poaching: Gawker Explains It All

Gawker contemplates an incident in which the NY Times apparently stole a year-old story from the Wall Street Journal. But Gawker's explanation, if true, explains a lot about why blogs get acknowledgment only rarely when the papers run familiar-sounding stories.

According to Gawker, the Golden Rule is:

Media outlets can only steal outright from other media outlets that are not their direct competitors, and do not fall in their same class.

* * *

When stealing from one's own class, it must be acknowledged that you are doing so, and that you have been scooped.

Unfortunately, Gawker rules leave us with little recourse. For one, no Ohio media outlets acknowledge parity with even the mightiest blogs. For another, bloggers have little ability to impose the "penalties" for violation:

Those who foolishly flout this rule by stealing the work of other reporters in their same class with no credit can expect to be ostracized at media parties; have vicious gossip about them leaked to Gawker; and, one day down the road, to be the subject of a gratuitous backhanded smear in the outlet that they stole from (this goes double if you're dealing with tabloids).

On the other hand, the summary admonition:

Reporters are small people, and we never forget an insult. Play smart.

Applies to bloggers with at least equal force. Pay heed.

ABJ Is All About the Street

Posted on Ohio.com breaking news tonight:

An Akron man was bound to a chair, beaten and robbed of his wallet and weed before freeing himself and calling police.

Word? Homeboy had weed? Was it bud or just shake? A full lid or an eight-ball? Don't leave us hangin', yo.

Blogwatch Blogger Leaving Ohio dot com

BJ retirees posted today that Val Pipps, a driving force behind much of the Beacon Journals' web presence at ohio.com and the creator of Blogwatch, is leaving to teach full time at Akron U. From the "intercepted memo:"

Val Pipps has decided to become a full-time teacher of communications at the University of Akron beginning with the fall 2008 semester.

* * *

Val has been a tireless advocate for Ohio.com in general and breaking news on the web site in particular. From the time Val rejoined the newsroom in November 2006 until March, breaking news grew from 205,000 page views a month to 416,000 in March. He also was a key person in moving Ohio.com from McClatchy to its new platform last summer.

The Blogwatch page is currently empty and, per my RSS reader, hasn't been updated since April 2, though a banner for it still sits on the sidebar of the Ohio Politics page. It's not clear whether anyone will take over.

The loss of Blogwatch is of minor consequence. But if Pipps is as important to ohio.com as the memo suggests, the Beacon had better find someone with his vision and savvy to take over. As of now ohio.com is getting overshadowed by AkronNewsNow. If the Beacon cannot continue to grow its internet presence, it will grow increasingly irrelevant.

An Equal Opportunity to Be Mocked

Jill finds New Republic's cover depiction of Hillary Clinton "misogynistic."

Misogynistic, mind you. "Hated of women," the dictionary tells us. Not mere sexism or clinging to outmoded stereotypes, but actual hatred of women as women. That's Jill's accusation.

Eric points out both that the cover is not inherently misogynistic (in that it doesn't play on gender stereotypes) and the dangers of crying misogyny indiscriminately. One would hope that Jill's argument avoids the rhetorical trap of equating any attack on Hillary with an attack on women generally, though she veers dangerously close with this in Plundercomment number 9:

Yes, man or woman, someone who has done and behaves the way Clinton has would be a good target for a lot of what has been thrown at her. However, the misogyny is on top of all that - the sexist remarks - everything that is connected to obvious and far less obvious sexism that exists at so many levels in our society.

Tim chimes in with a post uses the cover as a hook for a genuinely misogynistic rant. Which proves a point to be sure, but still not Jill's point.

Jill's argument starts with the proposition that the cover "has nothing to do with the story" and lacks "journalistic integrity." From that we leap to "it's misogynistic."

To start with, I disagree with Jill's assertion that the cover is unrelated to the story. Both the cover and the story's title, "Voices in Her Head," use voices as a metaphor for the clashing personalities on her dysfunctional campaign staff. It's not the tightest fit, but I hope that we aren't going to say that satire becomes hateful merely by missing the mark. Identity politics are sufficiently fraught without ratcheting to that level.

More fundamentally, Jill is missing a step in her argument. To gloss the cover as misogyny, she needs to make the case that Hillary is being depicted negatively in a way that men are not. A quick review of some past TNR covers should answer that with a definitive no.

TNR cover art has savaged Rudy Giuliani:

Dubya, of course:


Disastrous Democratic political consultant Bob Schrum:
Bad boy media crit Michael Wolff:

A Hillary analogue to any one of these covers could similarly be called misogynistic if viewed in isolation. Now it's possible that TNR management published these covers because they hate Italians, Jews, Texans and fat guys. But probably not. The New Republic publishes blistering profiles of public figures and illustrates them with unflattering caricatures. As women gain political prominence, they will receive the same treatment from TNR and similar magazines.

No one said equality would be easy.

Ohio 16: Schuring's Near Miss; ABJ's Bad Call

Ohio dot com still (at 8:56) has Matt Miller beating Kirk Schuring in the GOP primary for the 16th Congressional District. The SOS site shows that Schuring pulled well ahead, apparently sometime in the night, 47%-42% (if you would rather add than scroll down, the county breakdown is here.) Canton Rep. also has the correct results.

A Miller win would have been a major blow to Republican prospects for holding onto the seat. Schuring is a nice guy moderate with cross-aisle appeal throughout Stark County. Miller is a hard right conservative who vowed to run on immigration as "the biggest threat America is facing" in a heavily agricultural district, no less. Also, Schuring is a Stark County native. While Boccieri represents part of Stark County as State Senator, he is from Mahoning.

So it looks now, notwithstanding the ABJ's miscall, that it will be Boccieri versus Schuring as we all expected.

Meanwhile, a funny thing happened after Mary Cirelli announced for the Democratic nomination -- absolutely nothing. She raised negligible money, campaigned hardly at all and mustered an anemic 36%. One would be tempted to speculate that she entered as a stalking horse candidate to allow Boccieri to get his name out, especially outside Stark where he campaigned pretty hard. One be tempted to, but Mary Cirelli is not that kind of team player. I've worked with her before and she is an irascible contrarian, often at odds with her party.

It's doubtful Cirelli was trying to help Boccieri, but help him she did; he netted more votes than the top two Republicans combined. Given the asymmetric campaigns on the top of the ballot, that's not much of a portent, but it does demonstrate how valuable having a primary contest can be.

UPDATE: No sooner did I hit "post," but Ohio dot com ripped down their erroneous story. Here's the screen shot of the original:

The First Blog Strike?

It had to happen some time. From Free Press, citing CWA:

Honolulu Advertiser workers fighting for a fair contract at their Gannett-owned newspaper made union history last week when reporters staged what’s believed to be the country’s first “blog strike.”

Their action and a landslide strike vote a few days earlier combined to push management to back down from its “last and final” contract offer and agree to new talks next week.

For three days, members of The Newspaper Guild-CWA Local 39117 refused to post to the paper’s online blogs, including an especially popular sports site. Many writers left messages for readers explaining their absence. Reporters, photographers and artists withheld bylines and credit lines from the print edition, a more traditional form of protest among Guild members. [Emphasis and embedded link added]

The Dumbest Headline in a Very Long Time

The most salient criticism of modern journalism is the frequent lack of evidence of any critical thinking whatsoever. A combination of short staffing, questionable quality in the talent pool and the latest mutations in the Cult of Objectivity have led to more and more stories in which statements from officialdom are reproduced without the reporter questioning even patently ridiculous assertions. A particularly pathetic example appeared in Cleveland dot com's Metro updates yesterday: "Driver's dozing saves his life in guardrail crash."

From the story:

Police said they expected he would have been killed when they saw the guardrail has crashed through the driver's door, passed through the driver's seat and through the trunk.

Atkison was taken to Huron Road Hospital for observation for a head injury but was not seriously injured, police said.

According to reports, Atkison fell asleep about 7:30 a.m. while driving east on Interstate 90.

The car served off the road and struck the guardrail with such force it peeled off the support studs and skewered the 1998 Ford from front to back.

Police said the fact that Atkison dozed likely saved him because he slumped to the right missing the impact of the guardrail.

At no point does the reporter allude to the painfully-obvious-to-my-11-year-old point that if he hadn't been dozing he wouldn't have been in the guardrail crash. But hey, the police say that's what happened, that's what we must report.

And these folks wonder why they get no respect.

Ben and Kyle are Back

The ABJ staff were true to their word. They worked with Ben Keeler and Kyle Kutuchief to get The Point back up. Ben and Kyle have done the right thing -- they've posted detailed accounts of the negotiations on their home blogs. Ben here and Kyle here. For its part, the ohiodotcom version is here.

The main sticking point is Ben's run at the Repub Central Committee on behalf of Team Coughlin. He's steering clear of the Elephant Wars on The Point (though we implore him to offer whatever he can on the Keeler Report.)

The resolution is about right. Unlike the PD's conflation of bias and conflict of interest, Ben running for party office comes closer to an actual conflict. The paper needed to do something to cure the conflict but, given the nature of political blogging, the conflict is curable. The main point is that ABJ neither imposed draconian rules, nor did they demand that bloggers be other than bloggers.

The Point Is Sheathed for Now.

The only new entry on ohio dot com's new blog The Point explains why the blog is on hiatus after day one:

In his effort at full disclosure, Keeler explained that he is a candidate for the Summit County Republican Party's central committee on the slate that would unseat Chairman Alex Arshinkoff. He also explained why.

We're concerned that the explanation as to why – while meant in good faith – left this perception: Ohio.com is paying a blogger who is using the Web site to promote a change in party leadership.

Alex Arshinkoff called and shared the same concern.

Etc. The blog is on hold until they work out the parameters.

h/t Redhorse who includes some thoughts as well. I agree that the MSM/blog mixing is fraught with problems. On the other hand, I do think there is a difference between supporting one candidate or another versus running for an office and talking it up in a paid MSM gig. Yes, even an unpaid party office. The ABJ was right to be concerned, but why then weren't they concerned before the launch?

If MSM outlets are going to hire bloggers the first thing they have to do is lay out sensible ground rules ahead of time. Why that didn't happen here is anyone's guess.