Link This, Gawker: A Print ‘n’ Read Article

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.]