NYTimes: When We Do It, It's Journalism, When HuffPo Does It, It's 'Piracy'

from the um,-ok dept

We regularly see established newspaper journalists look down on the world of sites that add value to news by assuming that aggregating, commenting on and providing context for news first reported by others is somehow a "lesser" product. Of course, what they're doing in some sense is overinflating their own role in the media ecosystem. After all, they don't make the news (usually). They're really adding value to the actual events by reporting on it. The others are then adding additional value to the reporting. It's all part of the ecosystem.

The latest sad example of this overvaluing of one's own work and talking down about someone else's work comes from the NY Times' Executive Editor Bill Keller (also a driving force behind the NYT's plan for a paywall). In a weird and somewhat rambling discussion, which eventually gets around to the future of news, Keller decides to attack the Huffington Post as a bunch of sniveling copyists, compared to his high minded version of journalism:

"Aggregation" can mean smart people sharing their reading lists, plugging one another into the bounty of the information universe. It kind of describes what I do as an editor. But too often it amounts to taking words written by other people, packaging them on your own Web site and harvesting revenue that might otherwise be directed to the originators of the material. In Somalia this would be called piracy. In the mediasphere, it is a respected business model.

But wait. Aggregation is exactly the work that Keller does as an editor. And his sneering complaints about "taking words" from other people, packaging them on your own website and harvesting the revenue describes the NY Times too. After all, the news was actually initiated by the people his reporters are covering. They're the ones who provide the actual story and the quotes and information needed. Does the NY Times direct any of its revenue to the real originators of the material? The people the news actually happened to and the sources of their stories? Of course not. The very thought would certainly horrify Keller. "Real" news organizations like the NY Times never pay sources. It goes against their very moral core.

But there's massive cognitive dissonance at work here. Keller and the NY Times are aggregators. They're aggregating stories that happen to other people. They then add value (often tremendous value) to it in how they report on it. But other forms of aggregators also add value by doing more with those stories: adding commentary, details, criticism, promotion and many other things. The problem is that Keller, in a fit of pure ego, seems to think the chain of news stops with the reporter, rather than the sources and the actual newsmakers. As Mathew Ingram notes, Keller appears to be saying: "when we do it, it's journalism; when the Huffington Post does it, it's piracy."

Keller, of course, is also being incredibly misleading, if not downright dishonest, in how he portrays the Huffington Post. The site certainly does plenty of aggregating of content from other sites. Though, I will say as the recipient of just a few experiences where HuffPo has chosen to "aggregate" content from Techdirt, that it is an amazing driver of traffic. Frankly, I wish HuffPo would "aggregate" more of our stories because it is the single biggest driver of traffic we've ever seen. It beats every other big driver of traffic by many multiples.

But, more importantly, Keller is being misleading in pretending that HuffPo has always just been focused on reposting content from elsewhere. From its very beginnings, it has always produced tons of new content. Some of it may be more high quality than others, but the site has always produced unique content, which Keller pretends is some "recent" change in how HuffPo does business.

Filed Under: aggregation, bill keller, journalism
Companies: huffington post, ny times

Why The Arguments That The Huffington Post Must Pay Bloggers Is Misguided: Payment Isn't Just Money

from the you-made-the-choice dept

We didn't mention the whole AOL buying Huffington Post story earlier this week, because there just didn't seem to be that much to say about it. It was an interesting deal, to be sure, and I'll be curious to watch what AOL does with the property, but, beyond that, it seemed like just another content acquisition deal. However, almost immediately after the deal went through, I started seeing some rumblings on Twitter, picking at the scab that has always annoyed a certain group of people about The Huffington Post: that it doesn't pay most of its writers. Sure enough, it didn't take long for this issue to start to spread, with the inevitable summary line of: "Hey, HuffPo became famous because all these people worked for free, and yet, they don't get a cut of the sale."

That story is now snowballing. Dan Gilmor wrote a blog post arguing that it was the "ethical" thing to do to start paying bloggers. Douglas Ruskoff said that he'd no longer blog on the site for free. And, of course, a bunch of cranky HuffPo contributors have created a whole campaign arguing that Arianna Huffington had no right to sell the site, since it was built off of their free labor.

They're all wrong.

Of course, we've been through this before. Five years ago, Nick Carr tried to argue that all the various big Web 2.0 sites like (at the time) Digg, YouTube and MySpace were really digital sharecroppers exploiting labor. As we argued at the time, this was hogwash. People were using those sites because they provided a valuable service. The reason they provided labor was because they got something of value in return -- whether it was attention or hosting or distribution or reputation.

Three years ago, we saw an almost identical controversy after AOL bought Bebo and musician Billy Bragg demanded some of the $850 million AOL paid (in retrospect, a massively bad decision). Bragg argued that Bebo made this money based on all of the "free labor" of musicians who used the site. But that ignored the fact that those musicians got tremendous value in using the Bebo platform to connect with fans and distribute their music... all for free. The folks who got to keep the money were the ones who took the actual risk. The ones who had to cover the expenses to keep the site and the service running, even when it wasn't making enough revenue. They took the risk, they should get the reward. The people who used the site did so of their own free will knowing quite well that the benefit they got from using the service was worth it to them at the time. Along those lines, if Bebo had struggled and faced bankruptcy instead of a massive buyout, would Bragg have felt obligated to give them money to keep it going? Similarly, if HuffPo had been running out of money, and Arianna had gone back and demanded that those who used the platform pay up retroactively, how would these people have reacted?

There are more ways to "get paid" than with money.

The reason that people chose to blog for free at the Huffington Post was because it's a fantastic platform for exposure. It brings traffic like no one else out there, and if you want to present something in a way that's likely to get more attention than on your own blog that no one visits, posting at HuffPo can be quite a good way to go.

And that's the point: the people who chose -- of their own free will -- to post at the Huffington Post for free did so because they clearly got value out of doing so. Otherwise, why would they have done so in the first place? To then say that the only proper thing is to pay them is completely missing the point. It's an attempt to retroactively go back and change the terms of a deal. If you wanted to get paid directly for what you write, fine, don't write for the Huffington Post. It's that simple. Go out and pitch your stories to publishers who pay freelancers. But don't go back and complain afterwards when the folks who actually did take the risk of putting together the site, financing it, organizing it, hiring the staff, buying the servers, paying for the bandwidth, and building it up so that it was such a successful platform, then get paid for their efforts.

Filed Under: business models, payment, platforms, value
Companies: aol, huffington post

Arianna Huffington Sued For 'Stealing' The Idea For The Huffington Post

from the you-can't-steal-ideas dept

Apparently two political consultants, Peter Daou and James Boyce, thought they had a deal back in 2004 to help create a blogging site with Arianna Huffington and Ken Lerer -- and they're now suing both of them for "idea misappropriation" over the Huffington Post. The whole filing is quite a read: Of course, you can't own an idea, so it's a bit silly to claim otherwise. There's also a breach of contract claim, which also seems like a huge stretch. While it is possible to have a verbal contract, from the filings, it's going to be very difficult for Daou and Boyce to prove that there was any official verbal contract at work here. It sounded like early stages of planning, before Huffington and Lerer decided to go in their own direction.

Also quite damning is the fact that the lawsuit is being filed more than 5 years after the events took place. Daou and Boyce try to explain this away by claiming that a public legal fight would hurt their ability to get other work, which doesn't really make much sense. On top of that Daou and Boyce have been regular contributors to The Huffington Post. In the lawsuit, they suggest that they still wanted it to be a success and hoped that Huffington and Lerer would make things right. It's difficult to see this court case getting very far, but it may scare people off from having any conversations with Daou or Boyce about potentially working together on any kind of project, as it seems they might sue you in the future if you don't automatically cut them in on it if you decide to go off and do it on your own.

Filed Under: arianna huffington, execution, ideas, james boyce, peter daou
Companies: huffington post

Embracing Traffic From Those Darn Aggregators

from the let-it-flow dept

With the new effort by newspaper folks who are unable to come up with a business model to blame news aggregators with big time executives from media companies insisting that aggregators "steal" from them by sending them traffic, it's time to brush away that myth. Take, for example, the excellent tech/social media blog ReadWriteWeb, who recently had an article about Eric Schmidt's predictions for what the web will look like in five years. Soon afterwards, the Huffington Post "aggregated" that story and posted the opening on its own site with a link to the full article. For over a year now, we've been hearing mainstream publications complain about this sort of thing by the HuffPo, with the NYTimes digital boss Martin Nisenholtz complaining about this activity just last week.

But, of course, all this sort of activity does is bring in tons of traffic. The Huffington Post gets an awful lot of traffic and a link from the site drives traffic. Marshall Kirkpatrick, from RWW, noted that the single HuffPo link drove 10,000 page views in just four hours, and basically begged HuffPo to "steal" more content like that. Indeed, it's still really difficult to understand why mainstream publications are so up in arms over other sites helping to promote their articles and send them traffic -- even to the point of looking to pass laws to stop such activity.

Filed Under: aggregators, traffic
Companies: huffington post, readwriteweb

Oh Look, Investigative Journalism Still Isn't Dead

from the it-keeps-going...-and-going...-and-going dept

We've already discussed a few times how silly it is to claim that investigative reporting somehow "goes away" if newspapers go away. There are still plenty of sources of journalism, and the ability to make use of new online tools, including things like Wikileaks, suggests that corruption should be a lot more difficult to get away with in the future, rather than easier. But, still some old school newspaper folks insist that investigative journalism will die. And yet... we keep hearing of new investigative journalism operations. The latest is that the Huffington Post has put together an initial $1.75 million from some donors to create an investigative journalism arm. It's hardly the first, either. There are a growing number of online-only outfits focused on investigative journalism -- and it's likely that many will be a lot more efficient and better at what they do than newspapers who never put all that much money towards investigative journalism in the first place.

Filed Under: investigative journalism, journalism, newspapers
Companies: huffington post