Journalism crossroads...

Steal This Professionally Reported Content

By ERIC ETHERIDGE

Stop the presses. There's been another newspaper-blog dustup.

On Thursday, July 9, Washington Post reporter Ian Shapira wrote a feature story about Anne Loehr, a "generational guru" who advises companies and organizations about to deal with Generation Y. That same day, Gawker writer Hamilton Nolan excerpted several of Loehr's quotes from Shapira's story — for the purpose of mocking Loehr ("Generational Consultant' Holds America's Fakest Job") — and linked back to Shapira's article. So far, so normal in today's world.

Yesterday, however, Shapira took to the Post opinion pages to deliver a cri de coeur entitled "The Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition)."

A few weeks ago, I scored what passes these days for one of journalism's biggest coups, satisfying a holy writ for newspaper impact in the Internet age. Gawker, the snarky New York culture and media Web site, had just blogged about my story in that day's Washington Post. . . .

But when I told my editor, he wrote back: They stole your story. Where's your outrage, man?

His consciousness has been raised. Now the more Shapira contemplated the Gawker item, he writes, "the angrier I got, and the more disenchanted I became with the journalism business."

I enjoy reading Gawker and the growing number of news sites like it — the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast and others — but lately they're making me even more nervous about my precarious career as a newspaper reporter who enjoys, at least for the time being, a salary, a 401(k) and health insurance.

I started thinking about all the labor that went into producing my 1,500-word article. The story wasn't Pulitzer material; it was just a reported look at one person capitalizing on angst in the workplace. With all the pontificating about the future of newspapers both in the media and in Capitol Hill hearings, I began wondering if most readers know exactly what is required to assemble a feature story for a publication such as The Post. Journalism at a major newspaper is different from what's usually required in the wild and riffy world of the Internet. And that wild world is killing real reporting — the kind of work practiced not just by newspapers but by nonprofits, some blogs and other news outlets. . . .

After all the reporting, it took me about a day to write the 1,500-word piece. How long did it take Gawker to rewrite and republish it, cherry-pick the funniest quotes, sell ads against it and ultimately reap 9,500 (and counting) page views?

Shapira's essay instantly became fodder for the Sunday morning crowd on Twitter.

Media critic Rachel Sklar: "Did Gawker Rip Off The Washington Post? Yep."

No, said web evangelist Jeff Jarvis. This is just another instance of newspapers not understanding the new "link economy."

Tim O'Brien, who edits the Time's Sunday business section, was not buying Jarvis's frame: "Giving people gifts involves an exchange of value but it's not an 'economy'. Reboot the terms of the debate."

Jim Brady, a former editor of WashingtonPost.com: "So, a few thousand people encountered something you wrote who might not have otherwise? Great!"

Nick Denton, Gawker founder and owner: "Shapira's piece on the appropriation of his work by Gawker was eminently reasonable. Fanatical bloggers should chill."

Media critic Jay Rosen: "To me, the Gawker free riding story is compelling because it treats the conflict between old media and new as ambivalence within Ian Shapira."

As the day passed, the controversy moved from Twitter to blogs. At Columbia Journalism Review, Megan Garber picked up on the same themes that that had interested Rosen: "Shapira's essay . . . is a Socratic dialogue-unto-itself, a conversation engaged in by two characters of the same name: Ian Shapira the Washington Post writer, and Ian Shapira the Washington Post staffer."

Shapira-the-writer is, he notes, initially thrilled with the Gawker pickup. "I confess to feeling a bit triumphant," he notes. . . .

But Shapira-the-Washington Post-staffer … not so thrilled. Shapira-the-staffer cares—or, more accurately, is made to care—about the bottom line. ("They stole your story," Shapira's editor tells him, igniting indignation. "Where's your outrage, man?") He wants recognition, but not merely through the vagueness of attribution or the imprecise compensation of credit-via-link. He wants monetized attribution—attribution that will help, in turn, pay his salary and contribute to his 410k. He wants to be remunerated for the troubles he's gone to to create the story in question. So: he nitpicks. He nickels-and-dimes. He measures his worth as much by the hours he's spent working as by the result of those hours. He defines his impact not by the fuzzy metric of "attention," or even by the slightly-less-fuzzy metric of the links his piece has garnered, but by the revenue that comes from those online reverberations. Or, you know, the lack thereof.

In her column at Mediaite, Rachel Sklar expanded on her Twitter assessment: "The blogosphere has done something weird to the media industry: Now, the imprimatur of having contributed something is not the original byline, but whether your piece was 'picked up.' "

Pickup provides that extra stamp of relevance, that what you did is worthy of inclusion by the all-important aggregators — the outlets which determine the days need-to-know stories, so busy people with no time to read any of it will at least know what's up. Yes, yes, congratulations on getting your little article published in a top national newspaper — but a Drudge/Romenesko/HuffPo/Gawker link? Awesome!

It's not just about traffic, it's about affirmation: You're on to something. You're relevant.

But while affirmation is nice, attribution is nicer.

The issue of attribution is in play here, because Nolan did not explicitly mention Shapira or his article, but did link to the latter, three times in all. For Sklar, that's not enough.

These things are not cut-and-dried. If the Gawker item had credited Shapira by name up top, and praised his reporting at the bottom, it still would have been 8 paragraphs worth of summarizing his work. . . . Fair Use rules take into account how much of the work was used, whether it was added to/improved/commented on, and whether the allegedly-infringing use affects the market for the original work. There's no formula for this and, especially with respect to the latter, these are murky things to assess across platforms (would anyone reading Gawker have clicked on this link from WaPo anyway?). And it's hardly fair to blame Gawker for a form that has become institutionalized across the blogosphere. (Not to mention all those times that major newspapers picked up stories first broken by blogs without crediting!)

But we're at a point where something's gotta give: Where aggregators are surfing to new heights on the backs of content providers going broke paying for reporting; where audiences are now so fragmented that distribution relies so much more on the grace of these aggregators; where attribution and credit is becoming that much more important for personal brands, more important now that platforms at established publications grow more scarce and opportunities for paying work plummet. At minimum, if something's gotta give, then let it be credit and links, considering what's being "given" from the other side.

Matthew Ingram is willing to concede Nolan should have been more forthcoming with the credit: "I'd be willing to agree that Gawker could have— and maybe even should have, in an ethical sense — mentioned Shapira and his story specifically." Still, even absent that, Ingram is not buying the accusation of theft.

But there is no way in heck that a post with three links and an explicit reference to the source constitutes anything approaching a "rip-off" or the "death of journalism." How about the death of hyperbole, and the rebirth of rational debate about the value of linking and traffic, and/or the ethics of sourcing online? That would be nice.

At the Book Over, Hugh McGuire sees the controversy not as one of fair use or link etiquette, but something else entirely: "The problem is measuring the value of content."

Pre-web, written content was relatively scarce, and people wanted to read fluff. So newspapers paid writers to write lots of fluff, which filled a demand for a valuable commodity. The fluff was used that to sell newspapers & ads, and subsidize hard news.

But in the world of the web, we are swimming in a sea of written content. Much of it fluff. The overwhelming majority of it produced without a cent getting exchanged - by bloggers. Some of it is produced by professional blog outfits like Gawker, who produce it much cheaper than a newspaper does.

So, when other people are providing for free some of the kinds of content you used to sell, then you can't keep selling it. And the "free" is on both ends: free for readers, and free from producers. . . .

So . . . my question is: why would newspapers pay a staff writer to spend a full day investigating & writing a 1,500 word fluff piece when there are a million fluff pieces all over the web getting published every day? What value are they adding to the info marketplace, and is that value worth the money/time they've spent on it?

Shapira's essay also drew a response today from Gabriel Synder, Gawker's editor-in-chief, who readily agreed with the charge that "blogs are killing newspapers," though not in the way you might think.

It's not by mindlessly cutting and pasting from newspaper web sites. Gawker would go out of business if we did that all day.

The bigger threat is that blogs say the things that hidebound newspaper editors are too afraid to let their reporters write.

Look at Shapira's article, says Synder. It's missing "anything resembling a point of view." And that's exactly what Nolan's Gawker post provided.

Hamilton succinctly digested Shapira's piece and gave his post a headline ("'Generational Consultant' Holds America's Fakest Job") and lede ("The fakest job corporate America ever created was 'Branding Consultant' — until now") that was probably much closer to what Shapira wanted to write but couldn't. It's hard to imagine that in the course of working on his piece — a process that Shapira describes as two hours of sitting in on one of Loehr's courses and what must have been four truly grueling hours of transcribing the session — that he didn't have a chuckle or two at lines like, "I want to touch 500,000 lives this year. I am going to touch 500,000 lives this year. I do have spreadsheets that mark how many people I am touching." He suggests as much in his Outlook piece, complaining that Hamilton got to "cherry-pick the funniest quotes." (Emphasis mine.) So why wasn't there an ounce of humor in the profile?

Now confronted with existential threats, newspaper people rarely look at the failings of their own editorial product. After all, it's tough to criticize something when you're also trying to argue it's worth saving. . . .

Synder closed with a return to Sklar's topic — the need for affirmation. In this instance, that of a certain DC daily.

If you're going to fixate on blog links as the death knell of the industry, we have a lead for you: The threat is coming from inside the building. Nearly every day — 26 times alone in July — a Washington Post staffer not only sends us links to its expensive reporting, but even pulls out the most interesting quotes for us, so as to make it easier for us to pirate. I have strong feelings about revealing the identity of any Gawker tipsters, but in this case, it seems the public interest is simply too pressing and we must reveal this threat to journalism:

Maria Cereghino

Manager, Communications
Washington Post Media

Source:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/steal-this-professionally-reported-content/

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+0. I do have spreadsheets that mark how many people I am touching." He suggests as much in his Outlook piece, complaining that Hamilton got to "cherry-pick the funniest quotes." (Emphasis mine.) So why wasn't there an ounce of humor in the profile?

Now confronted with existential threats, newspaper people rarely look at the failings of their own editorial product. After all, it's tough to criticize something when you're also trying to argue it's worth saving. . . .

Synder closed with a return to Sklar's topic — the need for affirmation. In this instance, that of a certain DC daily.

If you're going to fixate on blog links as the death knell of the industry, we have a lead for you: The threat is coming from inside the building. Nearly every day — 26 times alone in July — a Washington Post staffer not only sends us links to its expensive reporting, but even pulls out the most interesting quotes for us, so as to make it easier for us to pirate. I have strong feelings about revealing the identity of any Gawker tipsters, but in this case, it seems the public interest is simply too pressing and we must reveal this threat to journalism:

Maria Cereghino
Manager, Communications
Washington Post Media

Source: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/steal-this-professionally-reported-content/