Unleash the copyright beast against the 'Beast'?

Yesterday, I pointed to the misguided comments by Judge Richard Posner, who suggested we ban linking -- and -- paraphrasing without the rights-owner's consent.

Now, from Cleveland comes a suggestion that is a tad more reasonable, but still troubling. Under the headline "Tighter copyright law could save newspapers," columnist Connie Schultz is promoting the work of the brothers Marburger who suggest resurrecting the old AP v. International News Service case and using the concept of "parasitic agcregators" to deny the ability of sites like the Daily Beast and Newser to rewrite and aggregate other news outlets' copy.

One suspects the real target here, however, are the hundreds of TV and radio stations who have done this long before the Intertubes and who have long been a bone stuck in newspapers' craws (and which Schultz briefly mentions).

So the Marburgers -- David, a First Amendment lawyer, and Daniel, an economics professor -- came up with the essence of a two-point plan (PDF) as relayed by Schultz:

• Aggregators would reimburse newspapers for ad revenues associated with their news reports.
• Injunctions would bar aggregators' profiting from newspapers' content for the first 24 hours after stories are posted.

For some papers, that last point may be the only value proposition they've got going in a world of otherwise largely "processed" news, and it's probably better than a total paywall. But not much.

There are so many ways to evade it. Are we going to have the "paraphrase police" out in force?

And are there really that many aggregators that are parasites to the extent they are cannibalizing traffic? (The authors pointedly say Google is not the problem.) And then there is this from Schultz herself:

Newspaper industry leaders are marinating in a brew of inaction and indecision. John Sturm, president and CEO of the Newspaper Association of America -- the chief lobbyist for newspaper publishers -- says his board of directors is considering various plans of action and hopes to agree on one "by the end of the year."

Let's hope some sanity prevails before then.

New views of plagiarism in a new age

If you want a good give and take -- and some eye-opening comments on how some folks view plagiarism in a completely different light in the social media age -- check out this from early last week about Chris Anderson's upcoming "Free" and its apparent liberal use of Wikipedia entries and some other sources without credit:

http://www.vqronline.org/blog/2009/06/23/chris-anderson-free/

The comments are the most interesting.

Lifestreaming

Well, Steve Reubel of the well-read Micro Persuasion blog has taken the plunge into "lifestreaming."

Somewhere between Twitter and blogging, lifestreaming is, to my mind, blogging for the peripatetic.

OK, it's a little more than that. It's really about being able to more quickly inject yourself and your thoughts, etc., into the ever-growing stream of online social networking/conversations. It's about "The Flow," as Stowe Boyd described it.

I have noticed that I am starting to get as many comments on this blog's posting on Facebook as on here. That's an interesting sign that has me looking at things like Posterous or Tumblr. We'll see. For now, when I write I tend to write a bit longer. But the idea of being able to manage the hub and "spokes," as Rubel puts it, through one site is interesting.

Rubel has a bit more on why he's "lifestreaming" and specifically notes that blogging just seems too slow and "needs a reboot." Since he's been at the front of documenting a lot of the changes for the past five years, it's worth paying attention.

Posner's solution: Ban linking, paraphrasing

The old saying is that bad cases make bad law.

The danger is that ridiculous thinking out loud by respected jurists could make very bad law.

Let's hope the legislative and judicial communities do not take up the suggestion from U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner that it may be time to expand copyright law to ban not only linking, but paraphrasing, without the rights-holder's consent.

This is seriously flawed in so many ways.

Let's just consider what this would do to search, the only really practical way to begin to even find, let alone comprehend, the vast amount of information being created. So could a search engine link to any company's copyrighted page, for instance?

Erick Schonfeld of Tech Crunch had an effective response in the Washington Post:

Much of what Posner wants to outlaw is public discourse. Why is it okay for people to talk about the day's news in a bar or barber shop, but not online? People should be able to discuss the day's news on the Web without fear of violating copyright law. The natural way people discuss things on the Web is by quoting and linking to the source. (Except maybe Posner, he doesn't seem to link to much of anything in his blog posts).

Posner never squares his position with freedom of speech or fair use rights. He doesn't even mention them. Yet those are precisely the rights which allow me to paraphrase his argument without his permission so that I can disagree with it.

Posner calls sites linking to newspapers "free riders," but Schonfeld notes that a link in itself is valuable in driving traffic to a site.

We'll just assume the judge has had his little joke and is chuckling at the hand-wringing. If not, put a stake in this vampire of an idee.

WOWO history

Early in my career, I had the great fortune to work for Group W - the old Westinghouse Broadcasting in Philadelphia and Fort Wayne.

Fort Wayne's WOWO, at 50,000 watts, clear channel was the most fantastic place to work in the mid-1970s. DJs with great pipes and great personalities like Ron Gregory, Chris Roberts, Calvin Richards and Bob Sievers. And a great newsroom with folks like Dugan Fry, Jerry Hoffman, Bill Fisher, Ed Kasuba, Debbie Lowe and Art Salzberg -- and immediate on-air access to the famed Group W network.

Now, Randy Meyer has put together a wonderful tribute site to the old "WOWO 1190." He's done it up right at http://historyofwowo.com. It's got airchecks (the 1973-75 one of Calvin Richards and Ron Gregory (MP3) was the beginning of my stint there - a snippet of one of my newscasts is very near the end - 43 minutes in), some of the great old jingle packages (MP3), photos, etc.

If you really want a taste of what music-news radio in its heyday was like, head on over to the site. I've got to go rooting through the attic to see if I have anything left to send Randy. Anyone else out there with old WOWO mementos, consider contacting him as well.

Use common "action" words

Too many news Web sites still use "journalism" terms as they try to move people around the site.

"Multimedia," for instance - when was the last time you said "let's go out and shoot some multimedia of the kids playing"? Or "video," "audio," etc. Yeah, none of those are greatly offensive or confusing, but they work against you online.

Simply put, your online site is a retail store - much of the psychology of retail applies. You want users to do something; to do that, use common action words: "read," "watch," "listen." Use labels like "photos and video" instead of multimedia. And try things like "your photos and video" and "our photos and video" to be more conversational (or even use "pictures" instead of "photos').

I've been working with a small daily S.C. paper this summer, The Item. It's started adopting this nomenclature. What do you think?

Getting it right on Sanford coverage

Kudos to The State newspaper for getting it almost all right on covering the tragic story of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

The paper very effectively used its Web site to get all sorts of information up quickly. Once it got confirmation that the e-mails between the governor and his Argentinian paramour were legit, it posted many of them. As a result, it got lots of exposure including debriefs on the late-evening news shows locally and on cable.

It put up a timeline to help people digest the story.

It posted a link to a Twitter search for "Sanford."

It made sure all the elements were accessible from each page.

It put up a poll, etc. (About all it didn't do was play the theme from "Sanford and Son," a rather tacky little move done by "The Takeaway on public radio.

Now, a few minor observations -- not really criticisms, but something to chew on:

• The State is a McClatchy paper. Things tend to "go away" into the archives after a week or so. I would hope that does not happen here.
• I would hope that once things die down, the paper creates a "microsite" for all the coverage. And I would hope the paper would give it an easy-to-think-of URL, such as thestate.com/sanford
• It would have been very useful if the stories all had a "sanford" tag - or "sanford affair." Too many news organizations still don't use tagging. Yes, microsites are useful, but the tagging gives another way for people to easily access the thread of a story.
• The timeline is good, but why isn't it interactive? This is another way to help people easily organize "the story."

Again, we have to remember that "the story" is no longer an individual river of text or a specific path through a Web site. Your users will define "the story" by how they meander through all the elements (for me, the story is the e-mails, but for someone else it might be Sanford's political orientation and presidential aspirations dashed, and for yet another person it might be Jenny Sanford and how she has handled this). The more we can do to give them the navigational and interpretive tools, the better.

None of this, however, takes away from the fine job The State has done.

Nielsen: Let folks see passwords they're typing

Web usabilty expert Jakob Nielsen is out today with a call to eliminate password "masking" -- you know, that row of asterisks or bullets you get when you type your password into a Web form.

He makes a lot of sense.

Nielsen argues that masking passwords makes people less confident and more error-prone, and ultimately less likely to log in on your site. That might be a stretch. But I think his second argument is right on point:

The more uncertain users feel about typing passwords, the more likely they are to (a) employ overly simple passwords and/or (b) copy-paste passwords from a file on their computer. Both behaviors lead to a true loss of security.

As for fears of someone looking over your shoulder while you type, Nielsen essentially calls that balderdash.

Apple, for instance, has an option you can click when entering a wireless encryption password that lets you see all those mind-numbing hexadecimal characters as you type them in. And if you were afraid someone was looking over your shoulder, you could unclick it.

I think that's a great idea online.

Broadband access grows

Pew is out with a report that says almost two-thirds of Americans now have broadband access - up 15 percent from a year ago. The average price also is up - to $39 from $34.50 a year ago.

Sanford

I am watching Gov. Mark Sanford implode on live TV. (You can find all the stories easily on the Web. No need for me to link.)

I stay far away from politics on this blog for a reason. Yet, it is impossible to watch what has gone on in this state for the past eight years, and all the recent rancor and bile over Sanford's refusal of federal stimulus money, etc., and not just shake my head in pity, shame, sorrow, frustration and anger.

What I wrote on Facebook:
Watching the news conference. Not surprising in one way, so WTF unbelievable in another. Clinton raised infidelity to an art, the GOP has just made it into widgets.

I'll let all the pundits take it from here. (But, damn, do I wish I were back running a statehouse bureau.)
----

OK, after listening to the talking heads, a couple of quick observations:
-- I'm not a betting man, but I'm betting Sanford will resist resigning. I'm not sure he wants Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer (known to be a bit flaky himself) in the seat of power and with a head-start on next year's governor's race.
-- I'm not sure House Speaker Bobby Harrell and others who have eyes on the governor's office want Bauer to have that either. (For now Harrell et al. are staying civil.)
-- Sanford already was a lame duck. Now he's a dead duck. He can just about give up any chance of getting anything he wants past the Legislature in his final year.
-- Katon Dawson, former state GOP chair, told Fox News that other pols were "lining up" to fill the vacuum. They were lining up anyhow. Now they can just be more open about it.

Not that Sanford had much influence in this anyhow, but this pretty much takes away any power of suasion he might have had to keep the GOP rabble sort of civil leading up to the 2010 election. Now, it's get out the knives and other weapons. This promises to be a bloody spectator sport.

Can news agencies just do 'good enough'?

That's essentially the bottom-line question of ex-Reuters man Philip Stone in Follow the Media.

It's going to be difficult. It's a result of the legacy of the news wires and the pressures the grew in the halcyon days of the 1980s and '90s.

Before then, the AP, for instance, had state offices that were fairly lean but were able to put out decent state reports because of the abundance of local media - PM papers, radio stations with news departments in about every county seat, etc.

In the '80s and '90s, covering such routine local stories started to become a bit unfashionable in metro newsrooms. In addition, the papers had started on their bureau cutbacks. (Remember, many states had at least one paper that saw itself as the state's paper of record, with far-flung bureaus. In Iowa, for instance, it was the Register. In Rhode Island (OK, far-flung there would be a little stretch) it was the Providence Journal. In South Carolina, The State had bureaus as far away as Beaufort, for instance.)

The call went out to the wire services more and more to take over more and more of those stories. It worked, for a while. And the culture that developed was that more and more kept members happy (and quiet) -- a good thing.

Then the bottom fell out. AP is buying out staff and consolidating desks at regional hubs, for instance. But that also means doing less. And let me tell you, one of the biggest complaints I hear in S.C. newsrooms is that the AP wire here, for instance, is a shadow of its former self. (I hear the same complaints from friends in other states.)

So if you are a wire service manager and your job security depends in at least part on not having member complaints, what would your reaction be, even if reason told you cutting back probably is critical.

AP is making the changes, as are other wire services. But it's a race against time -- and the members.

It's also a struggle against an idolatry of a false reality that AP loves to trot out as evidenced by this from a Columbia Journalism Review Article (you'll also find it retold on page 3 of AP's own reporting "Reporting Handbook" by Jerry Schwartz):

As the story goes, Mahatma Gandhi was released from an Indian prison in 1932 in the middle of the night to elude the press. He was taken to a remote railroad station where darkness obscured his identity. But then an intrepid Associated Press reporter named Jim Mills appeared out of nowhere.

It was not the first time the reporter had tracked down the holy man to land a scoop. An impressed Gandhi quipped: "I suppose when I go to the Hereafter and stand at the Golden Gate, the first person I shall meet will be a correspondent of The Associated Press."

AP emblazons that apocryphal quote on T-shirts as an emblem of its huge international footprint.

AP and the other wire services may be able to pull it off - but it will be a struggle for all these reasons.

Another link shortening - integrate to Twitter

So many link-shortening services seem to be proliferating. Just came across tri.im (OK, I'm slow in the uptake) that allows you to shorten and send to Twitter in one swoop.

Shirky on emotion as more central in news environment

Worth Watching: The Ideas Project's short-take interviews with Clay Shirky on the emotional aspects of news now taking center stage along social networks and some of the implications.

Henninger hot off the press

I'm happy to call designer Ed Henninger a friend.

I also consider him an adviser and mentor when it comes to designing newspapers, something I know just enough about to be dangerous. No surprise, then, that I devour his periodic "Helpful Hints."

Well, he's now compiled them into his latest e-book, "101 Henninger Helpful Hints," and I'd recommend you consider buying the download.

I'm not going to do a big review; he's got enough of that stuff on his blog anyhow. I'll simply suggest that if you haven't been getting his "hints" delivered every so often (and saving the PDFs), then this book at $15 or $20 (depending on the format you want) is a pretty good little investment.

And besides, he's unearthed this wickedly funny You Tube archive of ABC's John Stossel on graphic design:

Gaston, Gadsden, what's in a name?

But when get a basic fact of a murder story - where the suspect comes from -- incorrect in big display type, have the moxie to say we screwed up and correct it, as well as getting it right the next cycle.

Here's the latest example from the "your job is to separate out the homophones and know enough geography of your city to recognize that road doesn't go there" file.

Appearing in Saturday's edition of the local broadsheet and fishwrap was this screamer:

But on Sunday came this:

That last one may be a little small for you, but the deck says "Gadsden man." (Bluff Road, which is his address, goes nowhere near Gaston. In the map Bluff Road, where the suspect, lived is on the far right. Gaston is on the far left down U.S. 321 -- you might need to click on the photo to see a larger version.)

Gadsden is corrrect.

But no correction. I'm sorry, but that's not good enough. when you screw it up as badly as this, you need to do a formal correction. So far, haven't seen any.

The paper ran the correction on Tuesday. So let's see: Error in display type on Sautrday; correct information on Sunday; correction Tuesday? This is 2009. Why not just have said in Sunday's article "we got it wrong Saturday" and move on? Rapid transparency.

Avoid numerical hash

So this graf appears in a story on a newspaper Web site today in a story about a drug bust:

In all, about 4 pounds of marijuana, 1.1 kilograms of cocaine, 74.8 grams of crack cocaine and 98 Ecstasy pills, with a total street value of $31,360, were seized.

Avoid the numerical hash -- do the conversions. The writer pretty much seems to have regurgitated the press release or police report. But there are enough conversion sites online that there's no excuse anymore for not quickly converting it all to pounds (or ounces):

1.1 kilogram = about 2.4 pounds
74.8 grams = a little over 2.5 ounces

Make it easy on the reader. You wonder why they don't read us when we serve up hash like that? To that end, the article might also have split that last sentence so that there is no confusion the street value applies only to the pills (warning, generally check with the reporter on this), to read:

In all, about 4 pounds of marijuana, 2.4 pounds of cocaine, about 2.5 ounces of crack cocaine and 98 Ecstasy pills were seized. Investigators estimated the total value at $31,360.

(BTW, a good comparison I once saw is that a gram is about the weight of a paperclip.)

Google Wave and Bing

If you've kept up with any of the tech buzz in the past week, you might have heard about Google Wave. It's Goog's soon-to-come (as in sometime this year) product that combines features of e-mail, messaging, collaboration and content management into one kind of super platform.

It's being built with a whole set of APIs designed not only to make it easy to create features within it but also to integrate it into other content, such as blogs and Web sites.

If you are in journalism, you need to pay attention to this -- heck, if for nothing more than the contextually smart spell check (about 45 minutes into the video). But consider a breaking news situation, say the plane that was forced to land in the Hudson River. The tech and journalism world was all a-twitter about Twitter and how it allowed eyewitnesses to post photos well ahead of mainstream media.

Imagine what happens if a collaborative group witnessing such an event has a tool as powerful as Wave. (One thing unclear to me is how a "wave" might be made generally public if you were not publishing to another site, but I suspect I just overlooked that.)

Here's Jeff Jarvis' take on it. Meanwhile, make time to look at the hour and 20-minute video.

Microsoft, meanwhile, has come out with its latest search-engine foray, Bing. I tried it for a bit tonight, and it is a worthy tool to add to the kit. I still think Google gives me more relevant results faster, but Bing gave me some results on my name, for instance, that I'd forgotten about and almost never see that high up (first five pages) in Google. The contextual box that comes up when you mouse over a link also is nice.

I have to give it more of a try. But my suggestion is to start playing with it.