Link This, Gawker: A Print ‘n’ Read Article
August 3, 2009 by Craig Stoltz
As both regular readers of this blog know, I regularly choose an article that, due to length or some other characteristic, is worth actually printing out and reading off line.
The latest: The Washington Post’s “The Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition),” an Outlook section essay by Post staff reporter Ian Shapira.
True, it’s shorter than my usual Print ‘n’ Read picks, only 1,918 words [11,317 characters, or 81 Tweets]. But it’s worth reading away from the link-spattered madness of the computer screen anyhow, for reasons that will become clear below.
In the piece, Shapira writes about an article of his that was summarized, linked to and quoted by Gawker, the well-trafficked pop culture/gossip/media blog. He uses this incident as an object lesson in how new media may be ripping off–perhaps killing–traditional journalism by essentially rewriting it for its own audience.
Shapira argues that the Gawker entry quotes his piece at too much length and with insufficiently prominent attribution. He may have a point on both counts.
“Fair use”–the exceptions to copyright law that allow writers to quote from or summarize a copyrighted work–has no specific legal definition. In the age of the Internet it’s a moving target, and clearly some news aggregation sites and blogs habitually cross over the fat grey blur separating fair comment from appropriation.
But even if Gawker had been more circumspect in its work, the broader issue Shapira raises–that the economics of legacy media are threatened by linking and derivative re-reporting of work done by costly professional news operations–misses a crucial point.
A mainstream news site like the Post’s derives A MAJORITY of its traffic from “the side door,” which is to say via search engines, news aggregators, Twitter, big portals like Yahoo or MSN, and other sites, like Gawker, that link to its content. Not a little of its traffic, or a supplement. MOST of its traffic. *
The idea that meaningful numbers of people wake up in the morning, snap on the ‘ol PC, crack their knuckles and “read” washingtonpost.com from its home page inward and linger there until sated is a fond memory dating from the days of the dial up connection and 13-inch monitors.
Today, news users start in other places and wind up at reading online news at CNN, USA Today, New York Times or other big media sites via links pointing to them elsewhere.
Today’s news consumers are browsers and nibblers of ecumenical tastes and little loyalty to anything other than what appeals to and appears to them at a particular mouseable moment in time. Sorry, Ye Big Media Brands with Finely Tended Gardens. Those gardens have not had walls for many years. The emperor hath no box hedges.
So: If a news site like the Post’s gets most of its traffic from links appearing on other sites, it already is generating meaningful revenue from those links. The thought that it monetizes traffic that comes only from the Post site itself is. . .kind of weird thinking. A page view that comes via Gawker, or this humble blog, or a Twittered short url is worth exactly as much as a page view from washingtonpost.com’s “Opinion” site.
[Whether the Post has learned to maximize the revenue it derives from those page views enough to cover salaries, benefits and nice downtown offices [it hasn't] is beside the point. It has no serious options other than to try.]
If it tries to require those who link to its stories to pay a fee, the links will go away. It will have far less traffic to monetize. And it will hardly slow erosion of its print subscription base, which used to be the anchor of its business but increasingly is becoming, well, the anchor of its business, in the sense that it is pulling it deeper underwater with irresistible weight to certain death.
Rebuild the walls around your content by charging people to visit or link to it and you risk becoming the North Korea of Media–isolated and backward, depriving your citizens of nourishment and the benefits of global connection. You become a digital Kim Jong Il, but without the crazy hair and nuclear weapons.
But back to my original point, about recommending this article as a Print ‘n’ Read. When you print out Shapira’s article, there is no advertisement on the printed page that hums out of your printer.
What a missed chance! A perfect opportunity to sell a bona-fide print advertisement! Now that’s a quality ad impression, as they say in the biz.
I propose a partnership: When I recommend Washington Post articles as Print ‘n’ Reads, we can do a revenue share.
But I’m not going to pay for the privilege of linking to it.
[Interest revealed: I'm a former Post editor, but I have no access to current site metrics. Until 2006 I did participate in several formal and informal discussions where these "side door" numbers were discussed by people with knowledge of them. If traffic patterns have changed, someone please drop me a quiet note. Same for other mainstream news sites.]
It’s funny that people never seem to learn. The (increasing) argument that aggregators and other on-line entities are just “ripping off” legacy media is an awful lot like the record companies who complained about Napster. Unwilling to understand that this free sampling actually increases the demand for the content - and allowing its creators to build more, deeper and meaningful relationships with fans. “Shut them down, I say” (sounds like Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men) is their version of sticking their heads in the sand.
There’s an old investing and marketing axiom that legacy medium should paint on their walls - The Trend Is Your Friend. Fight it to your peril - embrace and good things happen.
Amen, Brother Craig. But short of embracing your proposed revenue share on “Print ‘n’ Read,” the question remains: What’s the WaPo to do — especially as that anchor keeps yanking it down, down, down…? What’s the Stoltzian Solution to raising this sinking ship? Or is the answer buried somewhere here at 2ohreally? (I’m a newbie in your neighborhood.) … See you soon.
I read Shapiro’s Outlook piece in the actual paper on Sunday and immediately added it to my clip file. (Yes, I know; I’ll scan all that cumbersome paper some day, OK?) And while I appreciate your point about the Post getting some kind of benefit from links, my reaction was yet more horror. I think the article’s essential idea is that someone reading the Gawker summary had no reason to click to the Post. Thus, no revenue on the Post site, and probably not much reader recognition that it originated at the Post.
And, hey, I’m guilty, too. I scan the headline feeds on my Yahoo page to get the gist of what’s happening much more often than I click through to a site for the full story (and thus give them my pageview).
Agreed that fair use is a slippery issue — and maybe Gawker was in its rights. But the contrast between Shapiro spending most of a week on his story versus Gawker’s half-hour cut-and-paste should be cause for more concern. Instead of harranguing the Post for missing some kind of opportunity, the better discussion is how to pay for the level of journalism worthy of summarizing. I don’t think it’s by encouraging more Gawkerism.
Hey, right on. Just one correction to make… this:
“A page view that comes via Gawker, or this humble blog, or a Twittered short url is worth exactly as much as a page view from washingtonpost.com’s “Opinion” site.”
…is absolutely 100 percent wrong. Dead wrong. Couldn’t be more wrong. It’s one of the most common misconceptions about the online ad business — that page views are page views, that traffic is traffic. Not so.
Without getting into the gory details here, the browsers and nibblers mentioned above are the kinds of readers who driver your site statistics in directions advertisers do not want, which obviously impacts what premium sites like the Post could charge for ads on those pages. And it’s not a linear equation either; we’re talking pennies on the dollar here.
Believe me, I’m not arguing against linking. I completely agree with you on all fronts. I just want to point out that linking and search are not a solution in and of themselves.
The fundamental problem WaPo (and many other legacy businesses) faces is that it’s business model is dying; and the reason that it is dying is because the artificial restraints that prevented READERS from getting what they wanted no longer exist. WaPo keeps thinking about it’s advertisers as the revenue generators; when the reality is that the readers have always been the generators - advertisers were merely the monetization strategy. Like links, don’t like links, feel like your stuff is being stolen by aggregators - it doesn’t matter. The market has spoken - are more accurately acted.
WaPo needs to stop protecting in legacy revenue (as it’s primary strategy) and focus on true value creation to build important and meaningful connections with its audience. From there, monetization strategies will present themselves. Sure, they may not be as big (initially) as WaPo’s existing revenue, but WaPo needs to stop thinking that it’s entitled to big revenue. While WaPo has lost a lot of their advantage in building the medium of tomorrow - it’s not too late if they embrace, rather than fight, the market.
Thanks all for the comments.
Doug: I have painted “The Trend is My Friend” on the wall of my office [joining the solitary "Redrum," which frankly has needed a companion for this time]. I am grateful.
Alan: Ah, another comment that forces me out of my comfortable bomb-throwing mode and into something constructive. No fair!
Still, I’ll try this: the way out for major legacy media is for every employee office and cubicle is to be decorated with Polaroid snapshots. Of anything.
The point being that Polaroid, when it saw the digital photography revolution coming, held tight to its core business model–selling cheap cameras and expensive film. It failed to invest in digital technology, because it could not figure out how to sell customers expensive film in the digital world. It didn’t know any other way of making money.
[See note below citing my main source of information the demise of Polaroid, which I'm adding here to make it appear I'm always really circumspect about my attribution.]
The company was sold for scrap, its stock price down to nearly 25 cents, the company disassembled, employees dismissed and factories shuttered. [The brand name has recently been purchased and repurposed by a group of investors for the digital age, results uncertain.]
Polaroid failed to invest earnestly in the new business. It “listened to its customers,” who loved its products. It stuck with its core competency. It rode its revenue curve all the way into the basement.
This should be sounding familiar.
News has a digital future. It belongs only to those who embrace it.
Other people far smarter than I about these things have begun to do the math and have determined that a news operation liberated from the costs of trees, trucks, drivers, fossil fuels, ink, underpaid hand inserters of special sections, etc. can survive, or nearly so, on digital publishing revenues.
As models develop, such operations may well succeed and grow–without ripping off the work of legacy media, but by creating original, web-native news content. Really expensive investigative reporting? Undetermined. Stuff like Shapira’s story? Easy.
Legacy media companies that decide to listen to their customers and stick with their core competency will ride the revenue curve into the basement. Their brand names will be sold for scrap to investors, who will create digital-only publishing operations. They may sustain small print products that work as marketing and modestly profitable product line extensions.
All that’s missing at legacy media operations is the wisdom and nerve to de-invest in the legacy product now, rather than 5 or 10 years from now, when they are forced to by bankers, lawyers and callow new managements teams who don’t understand the core values of journalism. They can do it now or they can do it later. Or they can wait for buyouts and leave it to the next team to figure out.
Top editors of newspapers still wake up daily and ask the question: What will appear on the front page today?”
Until their waking question is “What will we deliver on our website, mobile platforms, widgets, live blogs, Twitter feeds, digital reading devices, and user-generated content repositories today? And what do those folks in the innovation lab have on their whiteboards now?” they will not put themselves on a path to survival, much less profitability. Delegate the print stuff to the junior varsity, much as they do now with the web stuff.
The answer of how to create legitimate, socially valuable, high-quality news that serves the public is out there. But it is available only to those who commit to asking the question. Sorry, but those are the laws of commercial thermodynamics.
Dave: First, I expect your comments to be funnier than this.
Second, you are right that Gawker is guilty of Fair Use OverReach with this item. It may indeed have “ripped off” the Post’s reporting rather than treating it responsibly under what was probably the intention of the Fair Use Doctrine, though its intent is lost to the mists of time and besides never anticipated this whole crazy world of instant global digital chatter where everybody is a publisher and news behavior is far outpacing the ability to understand it, much less respond with nuanced legal and ethical guidance.
But even if Gawker had behaved responsibly–briefer excerpts, more prominent attribution, acolytic garment-kissing of the great Washington Post brand, grateful mash note to the talented Ian Shapira–the point would remain: Aggregators and other indie sources feed most mainstream sites a majority of their traffic. It is incumbent on legacy news operations to exploit that traffic commercially.
Trying to legislate or litigate away “free” linking to its content is a fool’s errand, at best capable of slowing erosion of its print products incrementally, deferring its demise for a few more quarterly earnings reports. Not a long-term survival strategy, much less a growth one.
So I plan to add to my office wall, along with “The Trend is My Friend” and the rows of Polaroids, a chart that shows the 10-year trajectory of major media stock values [in red] and the trend of digital news consumption [in blue].
“Redrum” will remain.
n.b. My attribution: The best source I found on the demise of Polaroid came from the brilliant, undercompensated, hard-working Phd candidate Chris Sandstrom of Sweden, who tells the story in this underappreciated SlideShare presentation, which is available for free and laboriously translated into English.
Do your bit for the future of communications and wire the dude some kronas via PayPal.
http://www.slideshare.net/Christiansandstrom/disruptive-innovation-and-the-bankruptcy-of-polaroid-presentation
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/christian-sandstrom/1/250/102
http://www.paypal.com
Aron–
Please elaborate, here or by e-mail to stoltzc[at]gmail[dot]com.
This is the first I’ve heard that “side door” traffic not only has less commercial value than “front door” traffic–but that those numbers are somehow known by advertisers in a way that permits them to pay less for it, or take their business to another site, if they can find it, where they can buy mainly, presumably more valuable, “front door” traffic.
Brother Craig:
Interesting post, delivered with the expected Stoltzian pizzazz. I’m not qualified to speak on the subject of how much legacy media sites derive from aggregators like Gawker. But I still believe that sites like Gawker constitute something like the remora of journalism, hitching a free ride on the larger bulk of established big media outfits that that do all the hard work of real reporting, so they can nibble and thrive on the most flavorful scraps, which they regurgitate to their readers, thus depriving their deserving hosts of additional sustenance.
(I promise no more piscatory analogies after this.)
Craig,
First, apologies for misspelling Mr. Shapira’s name. (See what happens when you fire the copyeditors?) Secondly, apologies for not being funny. I quote from my uncle Gene’s book, “Quote It: Memorable Legal Quotations” — “Never make people laugh. If you would succeed in life, be solemn. Solemn as an ass. The world’s great monuments are built over solemn asses.” Sen. Thomas Corwin (Ohio).
With that out of the way, I read Shapira’s online chat about his article (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2009/07/31/DI2009073102615.html?sid=ST2009073103389) and noted this question from “Dayton, Ohio”:
“Ian, an interesting article about a huge issue, but you left open a very important question about efficiency and productivity. Why did it take you four hours to transcribe notes? Why did you have to do an hour interview to get a few biographical facts? It’s not just that Internet journalism is sloppy, fast-and-loose, or unedited. It’s also that Internet journalism is simply more efficient — or perhaps, I should say that Internet journalists are more efficient. Papers need to take a hard look at how they are gathering, reporting, and editing the news, with an eye towards improving productivity.”
Sadly, Shapira punts the answer: “It took me so long to transcribe the session because I use an application on my iPhone, and it’s hard sometimes operating the application as efficiently as I’d like. (Using your finger to active the pause and play — and then listening again and again to make sure you got that one quote exactly right.)”
OK, don’t get met started on the iPhone — except to note that you can still buy cassette tapes. And regular digital recorders work great.
But Dayton’s notion about so-called Internet efficiency just clarifies the problem — too many people don’t understand how journalism is done. And, sadly, those people seem to be driving the debate. “The Internet is efficient! It can do everything! Stop whatever you were doing and join Twitter!” Shapira didn’t stand up for himself to explain that one hour may not even be enough time to get the real scoop on somebody and that accurately transcribing interviews is a valuable part of the job. Dayton seems to think that Gawker’s “productivity” is the real goal. God help us if he’s right.
[...] Link This, Gawker: A Print ‘n’ Read Article The discussion in the comments is even more insightful than the actual article. (tags: news socialmedia blogging) [...]
Nuttycombe, you solemn ass. Solemn but correct: People who haven’t done “slow journalism” do not realize how long it takes, how many pixels, printouts and brain-burrs wind up on the floor to write what appears to be a simple piece with intelligence and clarity.
Mark: This is the first time the word “piscatory” has been used in this blog, and I am very grateful. As it happens, I am a fan of marine-life metaphors for end-game legacy journalism myself.
My favorite metaphor species is the hagfish [quoting here from wikipedia]:
“While polychaete marine worms on or near the sea floor are a major source of nutrition, hagfish can feed upon and often even enter and eviscerate the bodies of dead and dying/injured sea creatures much larger than them. They are known to devour their victims from the inside.”
But thank you all again for the comments. Note the pingback above, in which Chrome Bits proclaims this comment discussion “more insightful than the original article.” I’m pretty sure he means than my original blog post. He’s right. You guys are great! Want to keep writing my blog?
[...] Day – 8 3 09 2009 August 3 tags: WaPo v. Gawker (2009) by Dave Levy Craig Stoltz, of Web2.0h…Really? talking about the battle I’m now calling WaPo v. Gawker (2009). Rebuild the walls around your [...]