BBC Link Policy: We Want To Send A Lot Of Traffic To Other Sites

from the how-refreshing dept

We're so used to websites whose "link policies" are about what they want you to do to link to them, combined with the tendency for traditional media players to hate the external link, as if it were some sign of failure, that when someone anonymously submitted a link to the BBC News' "link policies," you'll have to forgive me for expecting the worst. Instead, the link policies were a bit of a revelation. They're all about how to link more to other sources. It all starts with a goal of sending more traffic elsewhere:

The BBC Strategy Review [1.40MB PDF] recently unveiled by director general Mark Thompson set as one of its goals a major increase in outbound links from the BBC website - a doubling of the number of "click-throughs" to external sites from 10 million to 20 million a month by 2013.

It then goes into a list of specific policies, which pretty much all focus on adding lots of external links to stories. Of course, given how UK newspapers are suddenly working hard to block links from others, you have to wonder if those same papers are going to start blocking the BBC as well...

Filed Under: links, outbound links
Companies: bbc

UK's Times Online Starts Blocking Aggregators Hours After Aggregators Win Copyright Tribunal Ruling Against Newspapers

from the donkeys-arguing-against-the-wheel dept

There's been something of a battle going on in the UK over news aggregators. Obviously, we've all heard about the various threats by companies like News Corp. in the US to sue Google over its Google News product, but a lot of this has already been playing out on a smaller scale in the UK. Last year we wrote about newspapers in the UK threatening aggregators like NewsNow, leading some to start blocking NewsNow crawlers. This is silly in the extreme. These aggregators offer links to the news. The "issue" with NewsNow is that it sells this as a service to companies -- and the newspapers claim they deserve a cut. Note that NewsNow provides just a link and a headline and the tiniest of blurbs. It's much less than even Google News provides. The newspapers seem to think that no one can profit from advertising their own stories unless they get a direct cut.

In fact, last year the NLA (Newspaper Licensing Association) in the UK decided to start charging all such services just for linking. This is, of course, ridiculous. One of the largest services of this type is called Meltwater News, and it decided to protest this ridiculous license on linking. It was joined in this effort by the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA), who noted that there is no copyright on headlines and links -- and the NLA's license amounted to an illegal tax. The NLA responded by saying that Meltwater and PRCA had no right to protest these licenses.

Earlier this week, however, the Copyright Tribunal in the UK ruled in favor of the PRCA and Meltwater in protesting these new licenses, and it ordered the NLA to pay the costs of both organizations. Now there will be a full trial concerning the legality of the licenses.

What's interesting, however, is that hours after this decision came out, the Times Online in the UK just so happened to update its robots.txt file to block Meltwater (along with NewsNow, who had already been blocked). Basically, it was a quiet threat: if you don't pay, we'll block you.

The newspapers are walking a very thin line here. They're trying to charge for the most basic element of the web: linking and sharing links with others. I would imagine that if they actually win this fight, they're going to end up regretting it even more -- because if they start linking to other sites themselves, how long will it take before those linked sites start demanding money back from the newspapers as well. It's an incredibly short-sited view that a newspaper takes to think that others must pay you to promote you.

Filed Under: aggregators, copyright, links, newspapers, robots.txt, uk
Companies: meltwater news, newsnow, nla, prca

Want To Link To Royal Mail? You Better Not Be In A Hurry

from the we-don't-want-no-linkin'-promotion dept

If you ever read terms of use pages for websites, you know that they are mostly boilerplate. Unfortunately whatever template all these businesses seem to be sharing makes some ridiculous assertions, perhaps the worst of which is a provision against hyperlinking to the site without written permission.

Of course, to anyone who understands the internet at all, that term is clearly unenforceable. But these standardized terms show up all over the place, so I had always assumed that it was a bit of vestigial legal jargon, and that most businesses weren't even aware of it. UK blogger Malcolm Coles discovered otherwise when he obeyed the terms on the Royal Mail website and requested written permission to link to a page. This initiated a bureaucratic farce that lasted for four months with no resolution.

To get your licence posted to you:

• You have to write a letter to find out the right web address for the application form.
• The letter back gives you a web address
• The web address tells you to email.
• When you email they don't reply.
• But they do give you the option to, er, write in again.

That's right: the post office in the UK wants you to send them a letter and an email before you link to their website — and even then they never get around to giving you permission. Oh, and the page Coles wanted to link to? It was Royal Mail's business start-up services, which he was trying to promote for free.

Filed Under: links, royal mail, uk

Print Mindset vs. Internet Mindset: Do You Link? Do You Credit Sources?

from the fight-for-the-digital-ages dept

We recently wrote about how the NY Post was caught taking a blogger's story and rewriting it for itself -- noting the hypocrisy of a News Corp. newspaper copying from someone else, after Rupert Murdoch and his top execs have been going around decrying various news aggregators (and Google especially) for "stealing" from News Corp. newspapers. It's even more ridiculous when you think about it -- because the "stealing" that Rupert is upset about is Google linking to the original story -- a step that his NY Post writer couldn't even be bothered to do.

Of course, as a few people pointed out in the comments, this sort of "re-reporting" is quite common in the traditional news business. You see it all the time in newspapers, magazines and broadcast TV. They take a story that was found somewhere else and just "re-report" it, so that they have their own version of it. That this is incredibly inefficient and a total waste of reporters' resources never seems to be considered. But it's a very traditional reporting mindset.

But sometimes that leads to trouble. Felix Salmon has an excellent discussion going about how the recent NY Times plagiarism "scandal" really came about because of this mindset. First, he notes that the "reason" that reporter Zachary Kouwe gave for plagiarizing a variety of stories on his NY Times blog, was that he saw the stories elsewhere and wanted to re-report them and "in the essence of speed" clearly cut some corners in his re-reporting. But, as Salmon notes, this is a traditional reporting mindset. An internet blogging mindset would just see this story, and in the "essence of speed" link to it:

If there's a minor news story on a trustworthy wire service, and you think you need it on the blog, then link to it. You add no value by rushing -- with "essence of speed", no less -- to get the exact same story yourself. You're a well-paid full-time journalist at the New York Times; there are surely higher and better uses of your valuable time than going back to rewrite a story which already exists elsewhere.

The sin that resulted in Kouwe's departure from the NYT was that he rewrote badly, and left large chunks of other people's work unchanged in his own copy. But the true underlying sin was that he spent so much time rewriting in the first place: the beauty of blogs, which exist to link elsewhere, is that he should never have needed to do that at all.

Salmon goes on to point out that the big newspapers, like the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal, keep putting traditional reporters in charge of their blogs (not always, but quite frequently), and they blog like reporters, rather than digital natives. That is, they re-report stuff, rather than linking. And that's often because traditional reporters lived by the "scoop" and the idea that they had to be first. Acknowledging that someone else got the story first is seen as an admission of failure. But in the blogging world, it's seen as a sign of respect and of gratitude. But it's difficult for those who've lived in that first world to get their heads wrapped around this.

We recently wrote about the important role of curation in journalism -- which includes the ability to link to other stories, and add value to those stories (whether by fact checking or commentary or discussion). But too many traditional newspapers still have no interest in that kind of journalism, even as greater and greater numbers of their readers are actively seeking it out.

Filed Under: blogging, internet, journalism, links, plagiarism, print, reporting, zachary kouwe

LiveJournal Accused Of Redirecting Links, Swiping Affiliate Fees

from the trust-issues dept

You may or may not remember, many years ago, that one of the "tricks" used by adware was to hijack affiliate fees. Basically, the way it would work is that the adware would watch where you were clicking, and if the URL was for an online store that had an affiliate program or affiliate link, the adware would swap in its own adware account info, allowing the adware company to collect the affiliate fees rather than the company/individual who actually earned it. Sneaky.

However, now there are some claims that popular blog/community site LiveJournal is doing the same thing itself. Shawn Tutt points us to a story claiming that LiveJournal is redirecting outbound links from users such that they appear to strip any affiliate codes and add LiveJournal's own affiliate codes to a long list of popular e-commerce sites. It's hard to think of a better way to piss off a bunch of your own users than to replace their own affiliate codes with your own. Once people started complaining about this, it looks like LiveJournal stripped out the code. Still, it does raise some really big trust questions about LiveJournal, if it thought this was a good idea in the first place.

Filed Under: affiliates, links, livejournal
Companies: livejournal

The Role Of Curation In Journalism

from the don't-knock-it dept

Jay Rosen points us to an article out of France that takes a stab at presenting what a modern internet-era newsroom should look like. The point that I find most interesting, that helped clarify a few different ideas for me, is that it splits "journalism" into three distinct categories, all of which have a role in the newsroom:

1. Reporters -- who go out and do first person reporting -- creating original stories, not just reposting rewritten wire copy.
2. Columnists -- who "start conversations and give stories another perspective."
3. Curators -- who "'cover' the news by sorting, verifying and editing live everything good existing on the web and in the media. They make link journalism, they make the news more accessible."

Now, this is interesting in a few respects. First, many "reporters" today don't really do what is described as reporting above. That is, they often do try to take wire copy or stories that were written elsewhere, and go through the wasted process of "re-reporting" them just to pretend it's a new and unique story for that publication. In many ways, this is a waste of resources. What would be better is if they actually encouraged #3 above -- let a "curator" handle that sort of news.

Unfortunately, for the most part, newspapers seem to look down on "curating" as if it's some sort of lesser form of journalism, and this is a sticking point that they're going to need to get past if they want to understand how people engage with the news today. These days, everyone is a curator of the news in some fashion: they share news, comment on it, post about it, etc. But they also look to the "pros" to add more value to it as well. But if the traditional press looks down on this function, they won't do a particularly good job of it. It's sometimes tough for a press who used to want itself to be "the final word" on every story to admit that others may have reported it better/faster, as well as the fact that sometimes it's better to involve the community, rather than treating the community as riffraff waiting for the word from the god-like journalists.

If a newsroom were set up with a focus on those three roles (I would add editors as well...), with the understanding that they work together as a team to both bring the most information and community to a particular story, I doubt we'd see newspapers struggling as much as they are today.

Filed Under: curation, journalism, links, newspapers, reporting

Facebook Sends Lots Of Traffic To News Sites... Will They Start Demanding To Be Paid?

from the just-wait-and-see... dept

With a new report coming out suggesting that Facebook sends more traffic to news sites than Google News, folks like Mathew Ingram are asking if Rupert Murdoch, the AP and others will be complaining about Facebook "stealing" their traffic and demanding to get paid. Given their reactions to Google, it does seem like a reasonable question. Or will that only happen when Facebook is making much more money from its other lines of business, and those news execs get jealous?

Filed Under: links, news, traffic
Companies: facebook

UK Aggregator NewsNow Dumps Newspapers After They Demand Payment To Link To Stories

from the which-is-more-valuable? dept

Back in October, we wrote about how various newspapers, under the auspices of the "Newspaper Licensing Agency" were threatning NewsNow, a UK news aggregator that is (in my experience) one of the more comprehensive aggregators out there, but which only shows headlines and links to full stories. It's difficult to see how that would be a copyright violation in anyone's definition of the term or why that should require any kind of license. The NLA gave NewsNow until last week to "comply" and according to the folks over at the Nieman Lab, NewsNow has decided to bid adieu to those sources rather than pay up:

"Unfortunately, we have not been able to reach an agreement with the NLA. In spite of the NLA's claims to the contrary, we continue to maintain that what they are demanding of ourselves and our customers is unacceptable and of questionable legitimacy. Irrespective of the lack of a legal basis, the NLA's licence is not fit for purpose. This is not just about the charges they intend to impose on us, but the charges they would also impose on our customers for receiving and circulating links within their own organisations. In addition, it is a perhaps an under-reported fact that the terms dictated by the NLA scheme would oblige us to hand over customer details to the NLA, which seems to be developing a potential rival service itself. It is hard to imagine that this kind of behaviour would be tolerated in any other sector. The NLA has also offered no reasonable guarantees of limitations on the increase of costs over time. We strongly feel that to accept the NLA's terms would set a dangerous precedent restricting our customers' ability to conduct their business freely. We see this as a 'slippery slope' towards any free-to-access website demanding licence fees from any organisation for circulating or clicking on links."

It is interesting that part of the license would have required handing over customer info, and good of NewsNow to resist this. The aggregator says that it will still provide links to those sources in its free (extremely feature limited) online offerings, but will remove them from its subscription offerings. It's difficult to see how this benefits anyone. It makes life worse for newspapers, NewsNow itself and NewsNow customers.

Filed Under: aggregators, copyright, links, newspapers
Companies: newsnow

UK Newspapers Threatening Aggregator: Like Donkeys Suing The Inventor Of The Wheel

from the how-nice-of-them dept

Mathew Ingram points us to the news that some UK newspapers are apparently threatening UK-based news aggregator NewsNow. I've used NewsNow in the past, and I can't see what the complaint is -- at all. NewsNow provides headlines and links. That's it. At least when I was using it, it didn't even provide summary text. I actually discovered a lot of useful new sources when I used it, and that's because NewsNow always struck me as one of the best aggregators out there. It found a lot more than most of the others. To be honest, my big complaint with NewsNow is that they limit their free feeds significantly -- and there's no RSS or anything. After a while, I just gave up on using it, because without RSS, it just didn't fit into my daily method of following the news, no matter how useful the site is. However, it's really difficult to see what sort of complaint any newspaper could have with such a service whose sole purpose is to drive more traffic. It is, as the link above so colorfully describes:

the equivalent of a herd of donkeys filing a class action suit against the inventor of the wheel....

Unless there's something more to these legal threats -- and, admittedly, only one side is weighing in on what happened here, the whole thing just seems like a stretch by at least some UK newspapers to try to intimidate online sites into paying them.

Filed Under: aggregators, headlines, links
Companies: newsnow

It Ain't The Link, It's What You Do With The Traffic

from the sigh dept

A media consultant, Arnon Mishkin, has a post up at Paid Content supposedly about The Fallacy Of The Link Economy, where he suggests that those of us (he links to us at Techdirt, for example) who are insisting that aggregators aren't a problem and that news sites should be happy about getting linked to, are wrong. But he seems to have gotten the basic argument wrong. He seems to think we're saying that the all you have to do is get linked to, and you should be happy.

But that's not what we're saying.

The link is a vote of confidence, but it's just a start. From there, you then need to actually do something with that link. Mishkin dismisses the value of the link by noting that most people who visit those aggregator sites don't click through. That's not news. That's the way it's always been, but that doesn't mean there isn't value there. On this, I can speak from personal experience. Over the years, we never worked that hard at building our own traffic (we never built a business that depended on traffic), but our traffic kept growing. Any time we were linked to from larger sites, some people clicked through, but we always knew it was a small fraction of the overall traffic to that originator site. But, so what? It's still new traffic that wouldn't have found us otherwise. On top of that, we knew that most of that traffic would visit us just that one time and not think to come back -- but again, that's fine. Because what did happen is that we started to build up our reputation.

So, no, getting a single site to link to you isn't that meaningful, and won't drive that much traffic initially (or even repeat traffic), but as you build up your reputation, and get linked multiple times in multiple places, and then build up credibility based on your content and your community then people start to come back. So, getting linked from a certain site once is meaningless. But as we would get linked multiple times, we'd start to notice that then our traffic would increase. It was a case of that other site helping introduce others to us, not because of a single link, but the combination of being linked to multiple times, along with having good content and good discussions -- and then people would realize that it was worth visting us regularly (or adding us to their RSS reader or whatever).

It's an ongoing process, but the fact that most people don't click through on a single aggregator link is meaningless. Those people wouldn't have seen the story anyway, but it may help build up the brand of the original site. And, I can assure you, over time, if you keep providing quality, that pays off.

The problem here is that Mishkin and others seem to think the value is in the single atomic story. It's not and never has been. Being unable to view the larger picture and the overall process misses the point. It's not the link alone that has value or the story alone that has value, but the overall process of building a community.

Filed Under: aggregators, community, journalism, link economy, links, news, traffic