Reporting the news
Yesterday I found an article by Connie Schultz, via the Jeff Jarvis blog Buzz Machine. In the article, Schultz argues that newspapers should be granted special 24-hour exclusivity on their stories.
Essentially, she is arguing that news aggregation, blogs, and other news reporting agencies steal real newspapers’ stories by too-accurately summarizing or rewording those same stories. The newspaper that breaks the story should be allowed to capitalize on it with an exclusive window.
An amusing game to play is “how would this impact the news as we know it”. Imagine on September 11th, 2001, if only one newspaper or TV station was showing news about the terrorist attacks.
Imagine if you did not know where you were when Kennedy was shot, because your local radio station was too late to break the news and were not allowed to report it for 24 hours — you learned the next day.
A plane crashes in the Hudson river – a Twitter exclusive
In January 2009, an airplane crashed in the Hudson river. Immediately, there was coverage on every news station. The next morning — less than 24 hours later — every newspaper in the UK (and possibly worldwide) had pictures and a story on the front page.
The news broke first … on Twitter.
Make no mistake, as a micro-blogging service, Twitter is a publisher. Presumably this means that nobody else would be allowed to mention that a plane had crashed in the Hudson for 24 hours. Exclusivity is exclusivity, after all.
In fact, a vast majority of news probably breaks on Twitter before anywhere else. Twitter has been searching for a way to monetize — perhaps this is it. They can run newspapers out of business, by laying claim to each and every news story which appears there first. One can only read about current events on Twitter, for the first 24 hours.
Of course, many Tweeters would then publish to their own blog first. After all, why pass up that exclusive 24-hour window? Could it be sold? For how much?
If two people are at a newsworthy event, and both blog it immediately, who gets the exclusive window?
Competing against such blogs, newspapers would have to throw out fact-checking. It’s too slow, and someone will have the content blogged within minutes.
Perhaps I go to far.
Perhaps Ms. Schultz’s intent is not that there is an exclusive 24-hour reporting window before facts can be repeated. Perhaps she has not overlooked that reporting — at its core — is all about repeating what you have seen, heard, or read, and redistributing that information.
We are all news aggregators, every one of us. Whether we blog a Morning Coffee each morning, or discuss the latest gossip over coffee in the break room. Even those people who go to a press conference and then write a few paragraphs about it afterwards. This is distributing news that — in most instances — we heard elsewhere. As people get increasingly comfortable online, these are more and more often published: On Twitter, in blogs, on Facebook.
Passing on information by word-of-mouth is natural human behaviour, and it is hardly copyright infringement. And any law that makes the repetition of facts illegal — even if only for a limited time — is a frightening one.
One can only hope that lawmakers see this for what it is: a business in so much trouble that it is not merely requesting billions for a bailout, but asking for free speech to be thrown in the dust bin and to make gossip illegal. It is also dangerous for the newspapers themselves. If they inadvertantly report something already published, they would break their own law. And with a world of blogs out there, they can very rarely be the first at the scene.
Moreover, we must not confuse the technology at play with the function it performs.
The Internet, the printing press, the radio, the television. All can be used to convey information about what is going on in our world. So can two people who happen to be in the same room, speaking to each other.
Yes, there is more to reporting than this, but that is the activity at its core. Sharing gathered information with an audience. Any law that restricts only one means of relaying this information — or otherwise fails to treat all of these equally — is a bad law.
And if it seems silly to stop people from talking about the news in public places, then this proposal needs to be seen in that light.
Related articles: