Friday, July 31, 2009

Lessons from the MediaStorm Methodology Workshop: Day 4


Day 4 at the first MediaStorm methodology workshop explored social networking, blogging, gear and Final Cut Pro. The latter session was so deep that there’s little I can share from it. However, what follows are a few lessons from the day. You can read previous blog posts to learn about Day 1, Day 2 and Day 3.

Before I get into the lessons of the day, here is a link to some valuable MediaStorm documents.

You'll find a list of recommended gear and insight into Final Cut Pro.

Software Tips
• Tips from the MediaStorm Final Cut Pro workflow by Eric Maierson pdf(PDF)
• Video Tutorial: Producing with Final Cut Pro
Tips from the MediaStorm Compression Workflow: from Quicktime .mov to .flv, by Eric Maierson

You’ll also find advice on audio at the same location.

As for lessons on social media, Jessica Stuart, the workshop director, told us that Facebook is the “hub” of MediaStorm’s social networking efforts. She said that in February of this year usage of social networking sites exceeded usage of web-based e-mail.

To make it manageable to operate in a social networking world, she recommended you schedule it into your day. Otherwise it can eat an enormous amount of time. She reminded us that you have be be willing to converse and interact if you want to participate in this world. “You have to be willing to be you. Be real, be open, be involved.”

She encouraged us to secure our user names on all major sites now, even if we’re not going to use them. It’s too much of a loss to find out you can’t use the name you’re known by because somebody else grabbed it first.

We also discussed Twitter and other tools and how to use them as part of our work.

In discussing video on social networking sites, I learned of tubemogul, which allows you to upload video to many sites at once.

We also discussed blogging, and especially how to set up a blog in wordpress, which has become the clear leader in this area, and is a real content management system.
Sharethis.com is a site to get code to allow you to build sharing into your blog.

As for Final Cut, what amazed me was that a MediaStorm documentary has 16 tracks, 6 for visuals and 10 for audio. They have a very clear way of organizing their work to allow them to focus on the creative work rather than spending time trying to find things. They encouraged us to establish a clear and consistent system of folders and labels. Keep similar things together.

A long day, that ended with a trip to the city to hear a powerful presentation from the founder of Charity:Water, an amazing nonprofit bringing clean, safe drinking water to people in developing nations. Worth checking out and an example of a nonprofit that could use the kind of work that MediaStorm produces. There are many other than news organizations with important stories to tell.


Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Lessons from the MediaStorm Methodology Workshop: Day 3


Day 3 at the first MediaStorm methodology workshop got technical. Here are some lessons. If you missed previous installments in this series, here are links to Day 1 and Day 2.

The emphasis of the morning was on the importance of audio. Audio, Brian Storm told us, gives your subjects a voice. But he acknowledged that it’s difficult to do. It requires that journalists learn new skills. It’s “a craft.” But in his view, audio is more important to multimedia than visuals. Without audio you don’t have anything cinematic. Audio drives the whole process.

In building a multimedia story, you start with what they call “a radio cut.” It’s the sound track. Then you layer images onto the radio cut. One track for interviews. Another for ambient sound. Brian encouraged photographers to inverview the people they photograph for 10-15 minutes. Think of the audio interview as an environmental portrait. The journalist should control the situation. Get close to your subject. Lean forward. Place the microphone two inches off to the side of the subject’s mouth, in the shadow of the chin. Hold it with your fingers, not in the palm of your hand. That way you’ll get good sound. Brian emphasizes that audiences are more forgiving of weak visuals than they are of poor audio. That’s why it’s so important to pay attention to audio. If you can, turn off the radio. Stay away from a fridge. Beware the electronics in an office. Turn off cell phones. Look for places with soft surfaces to do the interviews. Set your sound levels once and leave them.

Remember, with audio you’re going to cut out your questions when you build the story. So don’t ask questions that lead to single word answers. Ask double-barreled questions. Ask questions in pairs or series. You’ll be more likely to get usable results. For example, “What is your name, what do you do and how long have you been doing it?” While doing the interview, think about whether you’re getting sound that you could use to open or close the story. Listen and think like an editor. Do not respond audibly when people are talking. Keep quiet. Ask sense-related questions. Ask people to describe what they heard, saw, smelled, felt. Ask for memories. Ask process questions. How did you meet, for example. Remember to record room tone for 30 seconds at the start and end of the interview. Finally, always ask whether there’s anything you didn’t ask, but should have, and whether there's anybody else you should talk with.

Separate from the interview, look for natural sounds that provide texture, mood, context or emotion. Record at least 30 seconds of each type of sound. Then provide an audio caption so you’ll remember what it was when you begin editing.

Photographers should have a basic audio kit of a recorder, headphones and a microphone. You must always wear your headphones when doing an interview to know what your recording will sound like. (I’ll provide a link to recommended equipment as soon as possible.)

Learn how to use your equipment so well that you can work with it in the dark. You don’t want to remind the subject that he’s being interviewed by having to mess around with gear during a conversation.

You can’t shoot photos and record audio at the same time. You need to accept that you will miss sound when you do pictures and will miss pictures when you do sound. Why not just do video, where you can shoot and record at the same time? An audio interview is more intimate than a video interview.

Brian advises that people should learn audio first, before learning how to shoot video. “Sound is the hardest part of the process,” he said. “Great audio makes great video. Video can follow.” Once a photographer becomes comfortable with audio, he said, they’ll always want it with a story.

Shooting photographs for multimedia is also different, because a multimedia story needs so many more photographs than a newspaper or magazine story. Ten photos exceptional for a magazine or newspaper story. In multimedia, you can use 20 pictures in a minute. If you shoot video, it will raise the quality of the still photography in a piece because you won’t have to burn off so many pictures to cover sound. Think on average three seconds per picture. That could mean you need 100 photos for a five-minute project. That’s hard to do. When shooting stills for multimedia, shoot like a cinematographer. Shoot wide, medium, close up and extreme close up for every scene. Use sequencing techniques to capture motion. Use rack focus (switching focus so that in one frame the foreground is in focus and the background out of focus and in another the background is in focus and the foreground is out of focus). Verticals don’t work well in multimedia. (Of course you can use them, but just as a rule the frame is going to be horizontal.) Always try to get copies of personal photos to have them available to help a story.

Shoot video for action/movement/immediacy. Be in the moment with video. Shoot still images for the decisive moments.

Shoot tight clean portraits of everybody who speaks in a story. Shoot them with clean backgrounds. Shoot copies of pictures on the wall, on the refrigerator, in photo albums, wherever you can find them.

When shooting video, don’t chase the action as you would if you were shooting stills. Let the action happen through the shot. Wait for the action to come to you. Keep the stage still. Start recording before the subject enters the frame and don’t stop until the subject has exited the screen. Frame each shot carefully, as carefully as you would frame stills.

Use a tripod. Use a tripod. Use a tripod. When you’re not shooting with a tripod, shoot wide angle and stay totally focused on keeping your body stable.

Don’t use zoom. Use zoom to focus between shots. You’ll cut between a wide shot and a tight shot. You need to shoot wide, medium, close up and extreme close up for every scene. Each shot should be from a different angle. Think 30 degrees different from previous shot. A guide is that every situation needs four different angles, eight unique locations and each shot to hold for at least 12 seconds.

We also discussed typography. It might seem obvious, but it’s key to make sure viewers will be able read text. If in doubt, make type bigger. Good web site for typography: ilovetypography.com. Another good site to look at for typography, Good magazine.

One tool that seems critical to help people work together effectively is Googledocs. This allows mutliple people to work on the same document. You won’t have millions of different versions floating around. I can attest to its value from using it for RedBlueAmerica.com, a short-lived national Web site I developed for the E.W. Scripps Co.

Another topic was interactive design. Too much to describe and too technical. A good Web site for technical questions: kirupa.com.

Finally, two more interesting sites we heard about: thebrowser.com and headbutler.com. Both worth checking out.

Onward...

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Lessons from the MediaStorm Methodology Workshop: Day 2


I'm at the first-ever MediaStorm methodology workshop in New York City. I'm trying to make it possible for people to follow my blog to get a sense of what the five participants are learning every day. Today Day 2. Here's where you can read about Day 1.

It's important to point out that there are many aspects of the class I can't share, not because I'm not willing or MediaStorm isn't willing, but because the class involves discussion of specific images and video sequences. We talk about them while they're on screen and it's very difficult to recreate that experience without doing a Webcast of the sessions.

We started Day 2 with an emphasis on quality. "Everything is driven by quality," Brian Storm said. "If you have a product that rocks, people will blog it or share it on social networks. That’s the new measure of success for us."

Something for newspaper folks to think about: In the mid '90s, video had to make you say, "Holy shit, dude come here you, have to see this." Why? Because it took so long to download. Now the problem with video on many newspaper sites is that it's not good enough. At some point, the audience is not going to hit the play button because they'll have been trained that the video isn't worth their time. That's why MediaStorm would recommend doing fewer pieces and making them better. Give people time to get them right. (To those who've worked with me who remember me encouraging them to be quick, because of the news value of video, that advice doesn't apply to compelling breaking news video.) You have to set a user expectation that the video will be worth the time, that the video will be special.

The work is expensive. So how to pay for it? MediaStorm's approach is to license to multiple mediums in multiple markets. Between television, web and portable devices, a multimedia news company can generate more streams of revenue. MediaStorm encourages media companies not to think of themselves as newspapers or magazines, but to do the necessary reporting, which will be more expensive, to expand their revenue and reach by distributing their work on television, computers and mobile devices, as well as in their print publications. If you spend more time to do the story, you can have three more channels: TV, computers and mobile devices.

As for fees, Brian's a "big believer" that there shouldn't be a standard for fees. "If we start charging for time, that's painful. Paying by time incents people in the wrong direction." You should make the piece the length it works best. He thinks photo pricing also misguided. Paying less for smaller usage incents customers to run photos poorly. Charge more for smaller pictures, Brian recommends. Incent people to run your pictures big.

We spent a lot of time discussing Iraqi Kurdistan, an awesome piece by Ed Kashi.



In-house, they called the project "the flip book," after the cartoon books that children animate just by flipping the pages. The story, done in sequences of still images set to music, explores how motion and a frozen moment can work together. I thought it was wonderful.

MediaStorm's biggest revenue generator is as a production studio. The company gets hired to tackle specific projects: cinematic narratives, interactive applications or full-on complete web sites.

An example of cinematic narrative we discussed extensively was The Sandwich Generation. Also worth viewing.



As I said, it's difficult in a blog to replicate our discussion. But here are a few examples of what we discussed that I think work without seeing the video. First, MediaStorm's philosophy is to use video to show motion and activity and still photography to show decisive moments. In the future, a single camera will be able to freeze frame video to capture the decisive moment, so the photographer will need to use only one camera. But they don't feel we're there yet.

Think character. That's how you get people to care. And finally, what is the apex of your narrrative arc? There has to be one. (If you watch this video, it's when the old man - the father - is in his house/garage as it's being cleaned out. The sound is painful. He's hearing it. And then he tries to save his old golf clubs. Very powerful.)

Finally, Brian emphasized the importance of sound quality. Even more important than video quality. "Bad sound will destroy the piece really quickly." It's painful/difficult to listen to.

The first question Brian asks photographers who bring him a story: "Got sound?" You can see why. What sounds does to a photo story is magical. It gives meaning.

As for story structure, do not break things into chapters unless you can playlist it, meaning it goes automatically from one chapter to the next. Otherwise, it's too easy to lose people.

NGOs and non profits are funding high-quality multimedia work. Just as with investigative reporting, these are other places to look for funding.

I'll have more on methodology in my Day 3 post, but one key thing I can share without further context is how Brian described their work process: "We work from subtraction. We look at everything." They're looking for the story in the work.

We talked a lot about a great piece by Brenda Ann Kenneally, which was a magazine story and audio slide show for The New York Times.



It was a wonderful magazine story about the children. But in video, the focus becomes a love story.

The story is an example of the kind of access good still photographers work to get, the kind of comfort-level they can build with their subjects. Very intimate and real.

One final lesson: Story trumps technique every time. Of course technique is important and people need to learn it. But if they don't have a good story, technique won't matter. And one thing clear about story, from looking at MediaStorm's work, is that it must be focused and disciplined. A story can't have everything. Everything in it must serve the story. (Those last two sentences are my editorializing.)

Lessons from the MediaStorm Methodology Workshop: Day 1


This week I'm attending a methodology workshop at MediaStorm, the multimedia production studio that in my view produces the most sophisticated storytelling in journalism right now.

Each day, after the workshop, I'll try to share a few of the insights I've gleaned from our class. There are five of us working with MediaStorm for the week: Janet Reeves, former senior editor for photography and multimedia at the Rocky Mountain News; David Carlson, who holds the James M. Cox, Jr. Foundation/The Palm Beach Post professorship in New Media Journalism at the University of Florida College of Journalism and also is the director of the university's Center for Media Innovation and Research; Tavia Gilbert, an award-winning audio producer and actress; and Kim Komenich, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer with The San Francisco Chronicle who left the paper earlier this year to become an assistant professor for multimedia studies at San Jose State University.

Day 1, with Brian Storm:

The two most important words of MediaStorm's philosophy: quality works.

When you do something really great on multiple platforms, vs. just for a single format, you will reach a larger audience and make more money. (Or at least you have that potential.)



The first story we examined in detail was Driftless, Stories from Iowa by Danny Wilcox Frazier, Chapter Six, which Brian described as a perfect example of a MediaStorm story. Totally worth looking at. It's a beautiful story. What makes it a perfect example of what MediaStorm is trying to do is it's a small story about a huge issue. It's timeless. And it involves sophisticated integration of video and still photography. Something else that makes this a fine example of how MediaStorm works is that it started as a book and then expanded for multiple platforms. In Chapter Six, you see three photos from the book. But there are 35 still photographs in the piece.

The essence of multimedia, Brian says, is that 1 plus 1 equals 5. When you put the elements together in the right way something special happens that's bigger than the sum of the pieces.

The power of music. Brian said when he was at MSNBC he wasn't allowed to use music, because it was considered editorializing. It can be the quickest way to destroy a piece. But it's incredible to see how they use music to carry a piece.

Interactive storytelling doesn't work, in Brian's view. Very expensive to do and doesn't drive traffic. Confusing for the user. They have to figure it out. What works is to produce something where the user can press play and watch something. "Linear media flat-out works," he said.

What the company does is essentially documentary filmmaking for a new era. What's somewhat revolutionary about what MediaStorm does is that they're open to all media types. (I think it's also that whatever they produce is produced for all platforms. They output their work in many forms.)

The long-form work MediaStorm specializes in is "totally hard to do." They only work on personal projects, because they need the photographer to be fully invested. That way they'll do the extra leg work necessary for this kind of work. Without that commitment, he said, they'll fail.

One of Brian's personal goals is to get photographers to stop thinking of the book as the ultimate product. He wants to change that so they'll be giving friends their DVD in the future. He wants them to realize that the DVD (ie. multimedia) is the most important thing. Not that a book shouldn't be one of the products. But that the added dimensions of the DVD make it the richer product.




The next story we studied was "Intended Consequences" by Jonathan Torgovnik, a very powerful piece on women who were raped during the genocide in Rwanda and then bore the children of their attackers. The story has led to $500,000 in donations to put 1,500 kids through secondary school in Rwanda, Brian said. The piece started with an assignment by Newsweek. It became a moving and complex multimedia story.

E-mail used to be the company's most important marketing tool - until about a year ago. Now it's social networking that's most important. The power of sharing. A blogger in Russia linked to their site and traffic increased fifteen times for a week. Facebook is "epic" for MediaStorm now. It's the home page for so many people. The "grand daddy of them all."

If you produce projects at the highest level, important projects, affinity groups will spread awareness of them for you. That is "one of the most revolutionary things happening in journalism." It's why if you do something, you want it to be the definitive story on the topic. To do something in the middle tier is a waste. People will post and retweet something they think is fantastic.

An example of how the world has changed and the importance of viral came when iTunes passed Walmart as the No. 1 music retailer. It would have been impossible for MediaStorm to get its stories into Walmart. They're too small. On iTunes, it took the company four minutes and they didn't have to talk to a human being.

The company's business model and approach is based on patience. The stories have a long shelf life.

An interesting note: All the company's work fits on Brian's iPhone. He literally can carry everything they produce on a hand-held device. A cool sign of the times.

In this first post, I've avoided reporting on our conversation about how certain pieces are done or certain effects are achieved. Perhaps I'll touch on those issues in later posts. But they seem to be better-suited for the conference room, where we're actually breaking down the work and talking about how it's done - at least after Day 1.

Onward....

Monday, July 27, 2009

PULITZERS LOST, WHAT A COST - Fifth in a series on the impact of thousands of job cuts at America's newspapers

What does it tell us that a passionate voice like Jerry Kammer’s is no longer supported by a newspaper? In 2006, two Pulitzers were awarded for National Reporting. The New York Times won one, and the other was won by The San Diego Union-Tribune and Copley News Service, “with notable work by Marcus Stern and Jerry Kammer, for their disclosure of bribe-taking that sent former Rep. Randy Cunningham to prison in disgrace.”

This series, “Pulitzers lost, what a cost,” explores the impact of thousands of journalists losing their jobs by asking some of those who have shown themselves capable of producing work of the highest caliber - winners of the Pulitzer Prize who are no longer at a newspaper - for their reflections on what happened to them and how they view the future of journalism. Mr. Kammer’s is the fifth interview.

Previous interviews: Deborah Nelson, Andrew Schneider, Kim Komenich and Janet Reeves.



1. Name: Jerry Kammer
Age: 59
Last news organization: Copley News Service

2. What work did you winner Pulitzer for, when?

Our story was a Washington political scandal whose central figure was Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham. We told how he was bribed by defense contractors for whom he stuffed earmarks into appropriations bills. We also told the story of a broader network of politicians who provided earmarks while collecting big campaign cash not only from the contractors but also from the lobbyists hired to represent the contractors. It was a story of a perversion of democracy by a system twisted by the relentless need for campaign cash. The decadent excess of several of these guys added spice to the mix.

Here are the stories that were recognized with the 2006 Pulitzer for National Reporting:

Story 1.

Story 2.

Story 3.


3. Why did you leave your paper? When?

This is a little complicated. I took a buyout from the Copley News Service at the end of 2007, about a year before they closed the Washington bureau, where I worked. A few months later, I got a call from an editor at the Arizona Republic (where I had worked for 16 years) asking if I’d be interested in a part-time job helping to cover the election. So I worked from April through the election in November. Officially, I was employed by Gannett News Service, but nearly everything I did was for the Republic.

4. What are you doing now? Any reflections on life after newspapers?

I’m now doing research and writing for the Center for Immigration Studies, a DC think tank that advocates reduced immigration. I miss working with other reporters. I miss the buzz of digging. But I feel fortunate to be working on an issue in which I have been interested ever since I was a correspondent in Mexico for the Republic from 1986-1988. Here's where you can find my blog.

5. What do you hope to do going forward? Will you stay in journalism? How?

I’m hoping to do useful work at CIS. Our country needs an open, honest debate on immigration policy, which I have observed since I was the Arizona Republic's correspondent in Northern Mexico from 1986 to 1988. I’d like to provide good information to help inform the debate. I have two fundamental concerns about immigration trends of the past 30 years. First, we are on track to double our population in the next century, a frightening prospect but one welcomed by the employers of low-wage labor, who have formed an ad hoc coalition with some liberal groups to push for "comprehensive" reforms that will further accelerate the growth of our population. Second, the steady rise of illegal immigration of poorly educated people from desperate regions of the Third World is importing a new underclass. Many of these migrants are willing to work hard for poor pay at the bottom rungs of an economy that is losing many of its middle rungs. They are employed by businesses that grow wealthy, while pushing onto the rest of society heavy costs for health care, schools and social services. The process is widening the gap between rich and poor and threatens to bring us the social structure of Latin America. I'd like to provide information that will help inform the immigration debate. My motto for writing about immigration remains what it was when I was a reporter: Always hard-headed but never hard-hearted. Every immigrant has a story. But as Barbara Jordan said when she chaired a federal commission on immigration reform, we need an immigration policy that serves the national interest. Out thinking about immigration should be guided less by nostalgia for our grandparents and more by concern for our grandchildren.


6. What has the downsizing of your former newsroom or closing of your former paper meant to the quality of journalism in your community? For example, are there types of stories not being told? You could use your own experience to provide examples here.


The closing of Copley’s DC bureau (which at the end was the bureau of Copley’s flagship paper, the San Diego Union-Tribune) means that San Diego has no eyes to concentrate on its congressional delegation in DC. It means the paper would have missed the Cunningham scandal had it developed a few years later. But there are some fine reporters and editors who remain in San Diego after the brutal downsizing. I’m pulling for them. I’m also pulling for my old colleagues at the Arizona Republic. We had a great I-team there, back in what we Old Timers will always think of as a golden era, when we had a sense of mission and the money to carry it out. But that era started to fade well before the recession, craigslist and the Internet-writ-large began tossing neutron bombs into the newsroom. When Gannett bought the paper, they turned Arizona into a colony. As history shows, the purpose of a colony is not to provide for the well-being of the natives; it is to generate profits for the home country, which in this case was Gannett corporate headquarters. In the relentless pursuit of a greater return on investment, they siphoned off resources that had previously been spent on reporting, on making the paper the ARIZONA Republic and not just the Metro Phoenix News You Can Use If It Doesn’t Piss Off the Real Estate Industrial Complex. (Thanks for that name to Jon Talton, the tremendously talented columnist let go by Gannett because he kept on pissing off the REIC). The staff suffered layoff after layoff, and the quality of the paper declined in tandem. But I’m still pulling for the staff that remains, including some first-rate reporters and editors. They’re terribly overworked, but they’re making a great effort.


7. What, if anything, do you think your newspaper should have done differently to prevent the downsizing or closure that cost you your job?

I’ll take the question as an invitation to a utopian vision of newspapers. The best thing that could have happened would have been for newspaper ownership to have remained in the hands of local families who had a sense of noblesse oblige, who were more concerned about being members of their communities than about maximizing profit. Capitalism is a wonderful system, when the drive for profit is restrained by a sense of social obligation and rigorous regulation. Corporate ownership of newspapers has ripped the soul out of many newspapers. Look at what happened to the papers in Phoenix, Louisville, DesMoines et al after they were bought by Gannett. The Gannettoids aren’t uniquely guilty. They’re just part of the steady ascendancy of buccaneer capitalism in our country. Look at Wall Street, where the bastards went wild with the smiling benediction of Alan Greenspan, whose every non-move was directed by the Gospel of Ayn Rand. Look at our gargantuan food industry, especially the meat processing giants who have relentlessly driven down workers’ real wages while increasingly depending upon an easily exploitable workforce of illegal immigrants. Look at our Congress, where the drive for campaign cash puts our democracy up for sale to the big-money-boys who know how the game is played: Hire the right lobbyists and make the right campaign contributions and Washington is yours. We’ve got government of the lobbyist, by legislative machinations like earmarks and regulatory nips and tucks, for the campaign cash. Mr Lincoln would not approve. But he’s the man who said that “we here highly resolve…” Does anybody highly resolve anything these days—except to get re-elected or pick up that mega-huge year-end bonus?

I see I’ve turned this into a rant. I’ll wrap it up with this: I used to think my politics were moderate or slightly left-of-center. But the perversions of capitalism that I’ve seen during my career as a reporter (including several years covering Charlie Keating and the plundering of the S&Ls) have persuaded me that Karl Marx was right when he said capitalism would be destroyed by its own excesses. The excesses that continually torment our society are devastating in their cumulative, debilitating, demoralizing effect. We need to see our actions today through the lens of Americans 50 or 100 years from now, who will be dealing with the consequences of what we do today. One of journalism’s jobs is to craft that lens, to stimulate that crucial American capacity for self-criticism and self-correction. God bless the reporters and editors who take on that job. God bless the media owners who provide them the means to do it.



8. What would you advise young people wanting to pursue a life in journalism today?

I would definitely encourage a young person who likes to write and who believes that good journalism is a vital public service to enter the field. But I'm a little concerned about this intern culture that has evolved, in which young people who have both connections and talent want to start at a big paper and stay there. There are tremendous opportunities to do good work and to learn every aspect of our craft at small newspapers. I am so glad that my first newspaper job was at the Navajo Times, in Window Rock, AZ. I'd encourage young people to develop an interest in a particular issue and then develop an expertise in it. For example, it could be a great adventure to start at a small paper in Iowa and become an expert in telling stories of the evolution of agriculture because of such issues as global trade, federal subsidies, the use of ethanol. It would also be fascinating to go to the Mexican border, learn Spanish, and write about the turbulent interface between the two countries and cultures, developing an understanding of immigration along the way. Of course, such a job might not be possible for a young person who finishes college with a lot of debt strapped to his or her back. But those who don't carry that load should see the world, have adventures, take a few knocks, become a more complete reporter, citizen, human being. That will help them avoid the narrowness and self-importance of too many young products of the intern culture. Having taken that knock, I'd need to add that I've seen some first-rate people take the multiple-internship route. But my bias is for those who have a broader imagination and sense of adventure.

Provocative position on value of local news

Vin Crosbie, blogging at ClickZ, has written a provocative post with the headline, "End of an Admirable Fallacy: Local News."

"To be successful in this new millennium, the local newspaper or the local broadcast station must provide a fully interactive database delivering the basics of the moment's weather and forecast, road and commute information, complete local entertainment and dining information, local school sports scores and menus, and the like.

"Investigative stories are worthy and always need to be done, but newspapers and local news broadcasters must first give people comprehensive information and data -- including access to all the source data, be that the town government's reports or each restaurant's daily menu. Only then should local journalists consider writing stories."

While I don't necessarily agree with everything Crosbie writes, I think he raises an important issue. I think too many journalists still don't accept the importance of a local site acting as a trusted resource for its community. News may not in the end be the financial driver for a local Web site. It may be what establishes and reinforces the value of the brand. But revenue may need to be derived from other sources. Second, local sites may need to be part of larger networks, making it possible for them to produce deep local reports with much smaller staffs than anybody used to working in a newspaper newsroom is used to. These aren't comfortable concepts. But they're worth discussing.

Sunday, July 26, 2009

A way for newspapers to make sure others don’t unfairly profit from their work - without erecting a pay wall

OK, let me warn you. This post may be complicated. But I think it’s important, so I hope you’ll bear with me. In part because what I’m going to write reflects a reversal of my initial position on an important issue - a possible change to copyright law - and in part because how I changed my mind is a lesson in the strengths of Internet journalism. I’ll explain both points in what follows.

The issue is timely. We’ve just seen the Associated Press take a hard line that news articles should not turn up on search engines and Web sites without permission. My view is that instead of trying to negate the benefits of the Internet by requiring a license to even post a headline and link, the AP would do well to explore the possible merits of the proposal I initially rejected.

Let me start at the beginning, with what I now see as a flawed but well-meaning attempt by Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz to put forward a plan that she said could save newspapers. Her column on tightening copyright law was based on the work of lawyer David Marburger and his economist brother, Dan.

Schultz’s column, which is best summarized by the paragraph below, seemed misguided to me. In general, I think it’s a mistake for newspaper people to look for salvation by attacking others.

“The Marburgers propose a change in federal law that would allow originators of news to exploit the commercial value of their product,” she wrote. “Ideally, news originators’ stories would be available on only their Web sites for the first 24 hours.”

While the first sentence is accurate (and might offer help to the newspapers that own AP), the second sentence gives the impression that the Marburgers want Congress to pass a law that bars reporting on what the originator of a news story has reported for 24 hours. (They don’t.)

But clearly the confusion wasn’t all Schultz’s fault. While the Marburgers had written a lengthy tome on this topic, it wasn’t as clear as it could have been and it deals with complex legal concepts that aren’t familiar to laymen, or most journalists. That’s why I say this case is a lesson in the strengths of Internet journalism, where writers can refine their work repeatedly in response to questions, criticism and suggestions from others. Which is what the Marburgers have done. I doubt that would ever have happened without online interaction. At the bottom of this post you’ll find a lengthy, point-by-point response to questions about their thinking. I think it’s worth reading in its entirety for anybody truly interested in this issue.

The idea of a publishing moratorium suggested by Schultz is so inflammatory that I was one of the ones who initially criticized the thinking of the Marburgers. In my first post on June 30 about Schultz’s column, I wrote: “this approach seems to be another misdirected attempt to right the newspaper ship.” Others, such as Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine also went on the attack. The debate quickly got off track, becoming personal. So I wrote another post on July 6 taking on Schultz’s argument in a second column that the criticism must mean she was on to something because she was being attacked personally. I don’t believe I have to explain why that kind of thinking is just plain wrong. Then I discovered there was a gap between what Schultz wrote and what the Marburgers believe. So I posted another item on July 9. In that post, for the first time, the Marburgers spoke out. They stated:

“1. We do not advocate a statutory 24-hour moratorium on rewriting news reports originated by others. Like you, we'd vigorously oppose that.
2. We do not think that linking to originators' news sites, as Google News does, is bad; on balance, we think it's good for any news originator.
3. We oppose the "pay wall" concept that many newspaper publishers endorse. For reasons that we summarize in our analyses, we think that it would be futile in the long run.”

I was still skeptical, but at least I understood that they weren’t nuts. I then wrote a fourth post in which the Marburgers explained how they thought the confusion may have occurred. I ended that column by writing: “I apologize for any confusion I may have created over this issue, but I think ultimately my exchanges with (David) Marburger are leading to more clarity on their thinking on how to help newspapers through these difficult times.” In that post, I included a link to all their writings on this topic, which I published on Mediafire.

We followed that post with numerous e-mails and conversations - the Marburgers, especially David, are anything but reluctant to engage in debate - and now I’d like to take a stab at explaining why I think the core of their proposal is worthy of further serious discussion, including by Congress.

Basically, they’re not against a link economy; they see its benefits and support it. But they believe that to survive newspapers need a solid foundation that allows them the opportunity to profit from their own work without “free-riders” taking it from them without a cost. They need a way to get compensation from those who use their work to act as a substitute for the real thing. It’s one thing to link without paying any fee. It’s another to replace a site, without paying the originator for its work. Those sites that do the latter drive down ad rates (they don’t have to support reporting or even advertising staffs) and damage newspapers’ ability to make enough money to be profitable. (I’m still concerned that there’s a need for better data on the extent of this problem and the cost. But I believe their economic theory has to be correct, that free-riders do hurt the originating news sites if they act as a substitute for them.)

In an unpublished op-ed, they explain how their proposal is based on common law that was brought to an abrupt halt by a decision of Congress in 1976.

“Copyright doesn’t protect any factual information that appears in news reports, despite a journalist’s hard work and resourcefulness in discovering those facts. It protects only the way that the report’s author describes the facts.

“But in 1918, the Supreme Court decided that the International News Service, a news dispatch service, could not compete directly against the Associated Press by rewriting AP’s coverage of World War I. The INS apparently rewrote AP stories from early editions of New York newspapers, and sold telegraphed rewrites to California papers. The rewrites reached California papers at about the same time that AP’s stories reached its California newspaper clients. So INS was competing against AP on the west coast essentially with AP’s own stories.

“Because copyright didn’t protect the facts that AP reported, AP won based on unfair competition at common law. Common law is a body of legal principles that come from appellate court rulings in law suits. AP got an order barring INS from rewriting AP’s stories, but only for the brief time that the stories had commercial value – typically one day. Over time, most legal scholars and many courts disagreed with the court’s ruling, fearing that it treated the facts reported by AP as AP’s “property.”

“Then, in 1976, Congress decided to add a clause to the copyright law that abolished all other laws that functioned like copyright. Initially, Congress was going to make an exception for the common-law unfair competition of the AP case – allowing it to remain viable -- but the Justice Dept. objected. Congress then dropped the exception.”

Today, the Marburgers say, the copyright law allows newspapers’ direct competitors to do essentially the same thing INS did to AP, only by using the Internet. News organizations that try to protect their copyright have very limited protection. In my 11 years as editor of a metropolitan newspaper, I never once tried to pursue a copyright action in court. And my company was not reluctant to assert its rights. The problem is that copyright protects only a nonfiction writer’s choice of words. (So, for example, I could call and get individuals to stop republishing an article we had written because they had published it in its entirety in a newsletter without our permission. But I had only persuasive power to resort to when somebody excerpted an article from my newspaper that I thought used too much of our work without permission.)

To remedy this problem, the Marburgers say, Congress should restore the exception. They want to lift the ban on applying common-law rights against unfair competition and unjust enrichment in the case of news that was established by the INS vs. AP case. They would like a single sentence added to the copyright act. This is what they think it should say: “The copyright act does not abolish statutory or common law unfair competition and unjust enrichment regardless of whether the contested publication infringes copyright.”

Then the issue would not be whether copyright has been violated. Instead it would be whether an aggregator is free-riding on the work of another, essentially taking it and making its own version a substitute for the consumer, diminishing the value of any link it might include to the original. They’re not saying that other commercial sites would be “required” to pay the originator of an article. Their proposal would create the opportunity for newspapers to get a court to order “competing commercial free-riders to pay compensation.” And I hope by now it’s clear that they don’t believe all aggregators are “free-riders.” Clearly, there are economic benefits to the originator of content from links to it that don’t go so far as to substitute for the original.

They see their proposal giving newspapers “some bargaining power that the law unwittingly has taken away from them, and that they need.”

The idea isn't to go around suing people; it's to bargain with them. But you can't bargain if you don't have any rights with which to bargain. Going to court would not be a newspaper’s first option. First, a newspaper would try to negotiate a voluntary agreement with a competitor it thought was unfairly benefiting from the newspaper’s work. If it failed, it would decide whether it would be worth going to court.

If a newspaper chose to sue a competitor, here’s a scenario the Marburgers paint:

An attorney for the newspaper would tell the judge that X web site persists in rewriting the newspaper’s news stories, posting them online at about the same time as the newspaper does, and making money off the stories by selling ads around them. The newspaper lawyer would argue that this allows the competitor to use the newspaper’s services to compete against it for advertising and undercut its rates because the competitor doesn’t have to pay for the journalists who produced the original work. “They are competing against us with our own news reports,” the lawyer would say.

Of course, a lawyer for the competitor would also be there, before the judge, to argue why the newspaper’s claims were unfounded. But if the judge agreed with the facts as presented by the newspaper lawyer, and the common-law gave the newspaper rights against what the competitor was doing (hence their call to revise the copyright act), the judge could issue an injunction ordering the competitor to postpone publishing its rewrites for a certain time and might even require the competitor to give up to the newspaper ad revenue it earned from the newspaper’s stories. Of course, the decision could be appealed. A decision on appeal would help shape the common law. And, of course, the possibility of such an action would be an incentive, at least in some cases, for a competitor to negotiate a mutually beneficial agreement and avoid court.

But to be clear, there would be no new statute requiring a waiting period or payment for linking to content. As David Marburger wrote me: “We fear the inflexible excessive empowerment that statutes often endow.”

The Marburgers say that if the exception were restored, a newspaper’s legal rights would be enforceable only under discrete circumstances. Those, they say, are: “against direct competitors who use the core of your news reports to compete directly against you if the competitor’s taking of your report provides a close substitute in the marketplace for your original report at the height of your report’s commercial value. Your legal right wouldn’t be enforceable otherwise.”

This does not mean a news organization would “own” the facts it reports, even though it may have discovered them and reported them first. The information is not the news organization’s property. But what it would mean is that the newspaper has the right to seek the help of a court when it believes there is unfair competition or that a competitor is unjustly enriching itself from the newspaper’s work, just as people have the legal right to keep somebody they perceive as threatening a certain distance away from them if they won't stay away voluntarily. That legal right would give newspapers bargaining power they don’t have today.

While this proposal is not the panacea for the newspaper industry, I do think the AP/INS analogy is relevant and I think reasonable people can agree that there may be cases where aggregators go too far. This could be one step that might help the newspaper industry. Without it, the Marburgers argue, the industry has lost the fight. I’m not sure they’ve convinced me of that. But they have convinced me that with it, the industry has a better chance of being successful. This way, if newspapers follow the path I hope they pursue and develop innovative content models that work for both users and advertisers, they should be able to be confident that they’ll be able to profit from their work. Otherwise, the Marburgers say, “the law currently compels the newspaper to allow competitors to take it (the content) and use it to compete directly with the newspaper in real time.”

Finally, I think they’re right that justice calls for people to pay for the work of others - when they really do take that work. Then the question becomes where the tipping point lies. That would be up to the courts.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The following is a response to critics by David and Dan Marburger, published with their permission.

We’ve surveyed some of the criticisms of our analyses of the effect of aggregators on the news business, and our proposal to restore common-law unfair competition principles to the news business. We offer these responses:


1st criticism – hot news: The INS v. AP species of unfair competition carries severe 1st amendment risks, says the critic. Suppose, for example, the critic explains, TMZ is interviewing Michael Jackson at Neverland Ranch. Jackson drops dead during the interview from an apparent heart attack. TMZ reports that fact on its website right away. Does that mean that only TMZ can report that fact for a period of time, say 24 hours?

Short answer: No.

____________________________________

Response to 1st criticism:

First: Understand the difference between statutes and the common law. This Michael Jackson hypothetical is a good example for contrasting the effect of a statute against the effect of the common law. We oppose the notion of a statute decreeing a moratorium on publishing an originator’s news for any fixed period of time.

In our hypothetical, if a statute barred anyone but TMZ from publishing the Michael Jackson death for 24 hours, our critic would have a powerfully valid point. Statutes are inflexible and don’t admit of any exceptions unless the legislature specifies express exceptions.

Judges aren’t supposed to craft their own exceptions to statutes, and usually they don’t. Judges can interpret the constitution to trump a statute or to modify a statute. But, otherwise, judges are bound to the letter of what the legislature decreed. Because of that, definitive statutes can empower people more than they should be empowered. We oppose that, just as our critics do.

We advocate instead restoring common-law unfair competition principles to the news business. Those principles applied to the news business in 1918. They are effectively absent now. Their absence is helping to drive the originators of written news reports out of business.

We advocate restoring those common-law principles simply by changing the copyright act to say that it does not pre-empt common-law unfair competition, and specifically does not pre-empt the species of unfair competition that underlies the United States Supreme Court opinion in International News Service v. Associated Press (1918).

We endorse the common-law analysis of Professor Callmann in his 1942 Harvard Law Review article, which our analysis cites. [Rudolph Callmann, He Who Reaps Where He has Not Sown: Unjust Enrichment in the Law of Unfair Competition, 55 Harv. L. Rev. 595, 599 (1942).]

The common law is markedly more flexible than any statute ever could be. If judges are working with common law, they have the flexibility to apply legal reasoning and precedents to achieve just results under the specific circumstances presented to them. They can adjust the common law incrementally to conform to the most persuasive legal arguments that competing adversaries provide in the context of the real-life predicament presented to the judges. Computers don’t decide cases, people do.

Also, statutes almost never state the reasons for their usually rigid rules, which enhances their rigidity. Appellate courts, however, virtually always state their reasons for their rulings. An effect of those stated reasons is to give future litigants the opportunity to present new circumstances and new rationales that might cause appellate courts to adapt the common law to new circumstances and new arguments.

Second: Depending on the context, competitors don’t necessarily free-ride in the unfair-competition sense by reporting that “TMZ reports that Michael Jackson is dead.”

Suppose that, 30 minutes after TMZ reported on its website that Michael Jackson is dead, the LA Times reported on its website: “TMZ reports that Michael Jackson collapsed during a private interview with a TMZ reporter at Neverland, and died. The Times is working to confirm that story.”

In that context, the LA Times report probably does not function primarily as a substitute for the TMZ report. That’s because the content of the LA Times report is so truncated that it functions as a headline for the TMZ report. Until the Times reports more information, saying only that TMZ reports that Michael Jackson died suddenly during an interview likely will drive a large proportion of the readers of the LA Times to TMZ. It probably won’t function as a substitute for TMZ.

In that sense, the LA Times report analogizes to what pure aggregators do. Pure aggregators provide headlines that describe more substantive reports on originators’ websites, driving reader traffic to those sites.

But, if the LA Times were to continue to summarize only what TMZ reports, adding more and more information gleaned from TMZ’s website as the story unfolds, the LA Times’ role would change. The Times would evolve into that of a parasitic aggregator, as we explain next.

Third: Under what circumstances would the LA Times become a free-rider on TMZ’s journalistic services under common-law unfair competition theory?

Suppose that the LA Times decided not to use any of its journalistic resources to try to verify the TMZ story about Michael Jackson’s death. Instead, the LA Times chose to rewrite on its site the essence of TMZ’s original reporting as it appears on TMZ’s site.

And suppose that the LA Times continues to do that as long as it decides that the TMZ stories are newsworthy, and, of course, the LA Times sells display ad space around its stories. Even if the Times adds a link to TMZ, that is free-riding, and common-law unfair competition theory that we endorse would create civil liability for that practice.

Suppose that the LA Times deploys its own journalists to try to verify TMZ’s report, while publishing on its own site: “TMZ reports that Michael Jackson collapsed during a private interview with a TMZ reporter, and died. The Times is working to confirm that story.”

And suppose that the Times eventually confirms the story with its own journalists, reports its confirmation, and maybe adds new information. That is not free-riding, and common-law unfair competition principles won’t create liability. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court said as much in INS v. AP.

Can we instantly know who is a tortious free-rider and who is not? Sometimes we can; sometimes it’s debatable. We address that later in this response.

Fourth: Generalities that you can derive from our hypotheticals.

When the substance of an aggregator’s for-profit, contemporaneous rewrite of an originator’s news report functions as a headline that moves reader traffic to the originator, the common-law theory that we advocate would not create any liability for the aggregator. Headlines attract interested readers to stories; for those readers, headlines don’t typically supplant the story.

But when those for-profit, contemporaneous rewrites include enough extra substance from the originators’ report to function chiefly as a close substitute for the originator’s report, the aggregator becomes a parasitic free rider. Our theory would subject that aggregator to civil liability as an unfair competitor that has unjustly enriched itself by commercially exploiting the journalistic investments of the originator.

That would not be true, however, if the aggregator used its own journalistic resources to confirm the report or to build on it by discovering and reporting new information.

Is there a gray area? Certainly, but, as a practical matter, that does not mean that common-law unfair competition cannot work or should never apply to the news business. There are plenty of gray areas in law. Common-law libel, common-law fraud, common-law wrongful death, and even common-law negligence have gray areas, but those common-law principles have survived and evolved and benefited American and English societies for centuries.

Does the aggregator who rewrites originators’ news for profit have no choice but to go out of business? No. That aggregator has six choices. They are:

1. Use its own resources to confirm or expand upon the facts uncovered and reported by the originator.



2. Contract with the originator to carry contemporaneous rewrites.




3. Become a for-profit pure aggregator by reporting the originator’s headlines and linking to the originator’s report -- for free and without a contract.




4. Postpone the for-profit free-riding until the bulk of the commercial life of the original news report has elapsed.




5. Stop using contemporaneous rewrites to compete commercially online with the originators.




6. Continue doing business as a parasitic aggregator and wait to see if you get sued.






Fifth: Under common-law unfair competition, what happens to the for-profit aggregator whose rewrites become substitutes for the originator’s report?

If common-law unfair competition principles applied to a free-riding aggregator, that aggregator would have civil liability to the originator if the originator chose to spend the money to sue the aggregator.

The common-law remedies for the originator would be for the court to require the parasitic aggregator to disgorge unjustly received ad revenue and an injunction barring the aggregator from free-riding during the bulk of the short commercial life of the originator’s news reports.

The details of all of that would be sorted out in the court case with adversarial arguments, cross-examination, and the usual judicial mechanisms to try to establish the truth and the best answer. That’s how every common-law case works, from injury cases to libel cases to fraud cases (all of which are common law).

The remedies of disgorging unjust enrichment and injunction already exist at common law for other species of unfair competition. They would extend automatically to a restored INS v. AP species of common-law unfair competition.

The loser in the court case may appeal to an appellate court, which means that at least three judges will review the case. Their ruling will create a flexible precedent that will greatly influence, but not mandate, what should happen in analogous future situations.

For example, if every county in your state withholds 911 tapes, insisting that they are not public record, you need to sue only one county over one withheld 911 tape to change the law statewide. If that suit yields an appellate opinion ruling that the 911 tape that you wanted is public, that court’s stated reason typically would have the effect of causing all of the counties in your state to release all 911 tapes.

The appellate opinion in the 911 suit might not declare that all 911 tapes are public under all circumstances, but the reason that the court gives for rejecting the county’s argument will have a ripple effect. Other counties may see from the court’s opinion that they have no better arguments for withholding their 911 tapes. So they release their tapes, seeing that withholding them would be futile.


That is the common law – a body of analogical reasoning based on principles of law that an appellate court announces in its opinion as the court’s rationale for deciding the case the way that it did. The rationales explained by the appellate courts influentially guide courts and people in deciding what to do in similar future circumstances, but the courts’ opinions don’t usually mandate what everyone must do in all future circumstances.

Sixth: The economic realities of litigation make the gray areas in discerning parasitic free-riders less important.

Two competing interests converge when mixing law with real life.

First competing interest: Businesses pay lawyers by the hour to sue, and legal fees for a single case can mount up. Rational businessmen and women have no economic motive to expend $90,000 or more to prosecute cases that test the limits of their common-law rights if doing so runs a high risk of creating a precedent that might undermine those rights in the future.

That is because of the common-law’s flexibility. Judges can adjust the common-law incrementally to move toward the most persuasive legal arguments based on the particular predicaments that litigants ask them to resolve. They can do that if their professional judgment tells them that reaching a just result requires a modest or even abrupt departure from existing precedent.

So originators of news usually would have little incentive to test their common-law rights in close cases. They prefer clear cases – especially in an area where the parameters of common-law rights are fluid enough to enhance the risk of creating “bad” precedent. Recall that the copyright holder of the Zapruder film of President Kennedy’s assassination lost in litigation to enforce that copyright against alleged unauthorized use of the film. What judge wants to rule that only one person can control for decades all public access to that historically unique and valuable record? Again, computers don’t decide cases, people do.

Second competing interest: No one conforms all of their conduct to avoid common-law civil liability all of the time. Common-law libel is an example. Everyday, large metropolitan newspapers and major market TV stations publish reports that technically amount to libels.

Here’s a commonplace example. A man carrying a concealed handgun enters a convenience store during the day, robs the cashier at gunpoint, and flees. The police release to the press and to TV a photo of the man taken by the store’s security camera when the man entered the store. The newspapers and the TV news organizations report that police want the pictured man for the alleged robbery, and accompany those reports with the photo.

That is libel in many states, including Ohio. In many states, there’s no privilege that protects a report like that when there’s been no arrest and no formal criminal charge. And, you can be sure that no journalist independently investigated whether the man in the photo actually committed the robbery. Yet, news organizations routinely publish such stories.

Editors often make news judgments so automatically that they are not consciously playing out their rationales. Editors publish those technical libels because they perceive the importance of the story to outweigh the liability risk substantially. And they are right. There is theoretical liability, but as a practical matter, those fugitives don’t sue. And those stories are important to the public.

The upshot of those two competing interests converging. The practical reality of restoring common-law unfair competition to the news business is this:

To avoid common-law liability, the aggregators will rein-in their most flagrant free-riding when competing directly with originators of daily news stories, and the originators will tend to sue only the most flagrant free-riding competitors that remain -- assessed by the degree to which the free-riding directly competes with the originator for readers and advertising.

Most free-riders will opt to become pure aggregators without contracts, to postpone free-riding for a day, or to contract with the originator of news reports to carry contemporaneous rewrites.

Some free-riders may opt to go non-profit, as do some bloggers. Our theory probably would not subject non-profit free-riders to any civil liability unless they charged a fee to advertisers, readers, or both.

So, the hypothetical of the free-riders being afraid of common-law liability if they report that TMZ says that Michael Jackson has died is a fringe case that won’t yield litigation or self-censorship. To avoid creating a bad precedent, the originator won’t sue the free-riders, and the free-riders will take the risk of reporting that extraordinary story even if the originator had the common-law right to prevent it.

Moral: Free-market minded Alexander Hamilton once wrote: “If the abuses of a beneficial thing are to determine its condemnation, there is scarcely a source of public prosperity which will not speedily be closed.”

Alexander Hamilton’s words are especially apt here. It is ludicrous to speculate by citing fringe examples that the sky will fall if common-law unfair competition principles return to the news business. The sky is falling today. The status quo is helping to kill the news business now. No speculating is needed. Common-law unfair competition is nothing radical; it enforces free-market principles of being able to reap what you sow; and it enables the free market in ideas to exist beyond the vacuous vocalizing of uninformed opinions.

Common-law unfair competition used to apply to the news business, and the law must restore it or there won’t be a news business.

2nd criticism – commentary about the news: The INS v. AP species of unfair competition theory carries other severe 1st amendment risks, says the critic. The critic posits: Suppose the Columbia, South Carolina newspaper breaks the story about Governor Sanford and his paramour through the newspaper’s own investigative efforts. Does that mean, the critic asks, the no one can comment about the story for some period of time because doing so would free-ride on the journalistic services of the South Carolina paper?

Short answer: No.

____________________________________

Two grounds overlap.

1st ground: blogging and columns are remote substitutes for the news story.

Reading a column or blog to learn the news is much like walking into a movie one-hour after the movie began and then trying to figure out what happened during the part that you missed. There usually is not enough factual context or raw factual information in a blog or column to substitute for the underlying news story unless you’ve already read it.

For example, Gail Collins recently wrote a column that included commentary about the e-mails between Governor Sanford and his paramour. If you never read any reports that describe the contents of the e-mails, you would find Collins’ column to be a poor substitute for getting a more direct report about them. In fact, her column may cause you to search the New York Times website to find a news report about the e-mails. That is because her column expects that the reader already knows the basic facts about the e-mails’ contents.

2nd overlapping ground: transforming facts into comment. An overlapping reason that our common-law theory would not apply to many columns and blogs is that the typical column or blog transforms the factual report into something different.

The commentary is organically different from the underlying facts. The commentary is not really substituting for the factual report; it is developing or transforming the factual report into something different that does not really compete unfairly with the factual report.

And, that something “different,” may cause readers to seek out the underlying factual report to better appreciate the commentary, much as visitors to Google News click on a headline to find out more information from the original source.

What about adding comment as a pretext for free-riding? Adding commentary as a pretext for free-riding is not an automatic free pass to drive a competitor out of business. If a blogger persists in rewriting for profit the heart of originators’ daily news reports, but adds a sentence or two of comment, the comment is no problem.

But the common law will ask whether the blogger consistently presents so much of the originator’s factual information as to cause typical readers to substitute the blogger’s summary of the facts for the originator’s report at the time when the originator’s report is at the height of its brief commercial life and on the same medium (online). The common law won’t inhibit the commentary, but in those circumstances it could inhibit the extent of the blogger’s timely for-profit rewrites of the originator’s facts.

Common-law reasoning gives judges and appeals courts the flexibility to resolve those kinds of difficult issues if any come before them. The United States Supreme Court ruling in Valentine v. Chrestensen is an example. 316 U.S. 52 (1942).

When the Court decided Valentine, the First Amendment didn’t apply to advertising. New York City had an ordinance that barred people from distributing handbills if they were “advertising matter.” A man who owned a submarine moored at a pier passed out handbills to passersby. One side of the handbill advertised tours of his submarine for an admission price. The other side was a protest against the city for refusing to allow him to moor his submarine indefinitely for exhibition.

Authorities cited the submarine owner for violating the ordinance. He argued that his handbill was as much noncommercial speech as advertising.

The Court ruled, however, that the facts “justify the conclusion that the affixing of the protest . . . to the advertising circular was with the intent, and for the purpose, of evading the prohibition of the ordinance.” The Court added: “If that evasion were successful, every merchant who desires to broadcast advertising leaflets in the streets need only append a civil appeal, or a moral platitude, to achieve immunity from the law’s command.”





3rd criticism: Your theory threatens the First Amendment right to report news to the public that someone else discovered.

Short answer: No it doesn’t.

_________________________________________

The First Amendment guarantees that you can speak freely, but it does not compel you to give away your speech for free.

Obviously, the First Amendment does not compel one news organization to subsidize a competitor with free journalistic services. Yet that is what the copyright act effectively compels today.

For example, the First Amendment protects nonfiction books, but it doesn’t require Borders Books to give half of its nonfiction book inventory to Barnes & Noble so that Barnes & Noble can compete against Borders by selling contemporaneous abridged versions of those books for 90% below Borders’ prices.

Here’s a twist on an actual case to illustrate the point further. Pretend that the law does not give anyone a property right in the factual circumstances that unfold in playing a major league baseball game.

Suppose that the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball club contracts with Pittsburgh radio station KDKA to broadcast live play-by-play of all Pirate games. The Pirates supply the announcers. The Pirates and KDKA negotiated the contract price that KDKA must pay. In gauging how much it was willing to pay, KDKA estimated how much revenue it would receive from selling air time for commercials during the play-by-play.

A competing Pittsburgh radio station, KQV, sends one of its sportscasters to the roof of a building near Forbes Field, where the Pirates play their home games. Walls surround Forbes Field, but there is no roof.

From the roof of the nearby building, the sportscaster has an unobstructed view of the game and is close enough to describe what’s happening. With binoculars, the sportscaster can see the numbers on the players’ jerseys. So the station has its sportscaster give real-time play-by-play of the Pirate home games from the roof of the building.

Another competing Pittsburgh radio station, WWSW, decides to do the same thing with one of its sportscasters from a balcony on another nearby building.

The competing stations’ sportscasters use their own words to describe the facts that they see as the game unfolds. All three stations compete for advertisers and listeners. Because the other stations didn’t pay anything to the Pirates, the other stations can sell ad time profitably at lower rates than can KDKA. They attract advertising money away from KDKA, and KDKA cannot match their ad rates profitably.

The Pirates and KDKA sue the other two radio stations for unfair competition and unjust enrichment under common law. Even though the first amendment applies to the various sportscasters’ real-time descriptions of the facts taking place on the baseball field, the first amendment probably will not interfere with the asserted common-law rights of the Pirates and KDKA. They will probably get a court order to force the other stations to stop the real-time play-by-play or to disgorge their ad revenue, and an appellate court probably would affirm that order, rejecting the radio stations’ first amendment defense.

But if KDKA and the Pirates sued to bar KQV and WWSW from broadcasting a post-game summary of what happened, the first amendment would intervene and defeat the suit. Generally, the first amendment will respect valid legal interests that interfere with speech until the force of those interests diminishes.

As we explained in response to the 1st criticism, there are a variety of options available to those who wish to rewrite others’ news stories for profit. The for-profit aggregator can wait to free-ride until most of the commercial life of the initial news story has dissipated. For most news reports, that is probably about a day.

Or the aggregator can contract to carry contemporaneous rewrites of an originator’s story, or the aggregator can become a pure aggregator without a contract or paying money, or the aggregator can expend its own resources to verify the report or to discover and write about new information.








4th criticism: Your theory would allow the discoverer of news to own it.

Short answer: No it wouldn’t.

_____________________

Our unfair competition theory would not grant an originator of a news report any property interest in the facts that they uncover and report, and we oppose granting them any property right in the factual substance of news.

We propose restoring what the law calls a “relational” interest. It is an interest against an unfair competitor commercially exploiting my journalistic services in competition with me without compensating me, but it is not a property right.

Here’s an example. Pretend that all players, coaches, and general managers for all National Football League teams are employees at will – they have no employment or personal services contracts.

Suppose that Rupert Murdoch started a league of pro football teams in the United States to compete directly with the NFL, but Murdoch’s league had no one experienced in running the pro football business, and no experienced players or coaches.

Murdoch needs his league to be good right away to attract television viewers and attending fans. So Murdoch systematically and quickly hires away the most experience NFL business, coaching, and player talent.

Does the NFL own those business people, coaches, or players? Of course not. The 13th amendment outlaws slavery.

Can the NFL get a court order enjoining its employees from jumping to Murdoch’s league? No.

Can the NFL get a court order barring Murdoch from raiding the NFL of its best employees without compensating the NFL? Yes.

Even though the NFL doesn’t own its employees and can’t stop them from going to Murdoch, the NFL has a relational interest with its direct competitor – Murdoch – that gives the NFL a common-law right to require Murdoch to compensate the NFL for the sudden and systematic draining of the NFL’s human resources, or to require Murdoch to stop the wholesale raiding of talent that the NFL developed and using them to compete directly against the NFL.












5th criticism: Your proposal will generate lots of litigation; a statute would be better because everyone would know the rules, thus leading to less litigation.

Short answer: That is a myth.

____________________________________

First: It takes as much litigation to enforce statutory rights as it does common-law rights. People don’t obey civil statutes simply because they are there. If you want people to obey your statutory rights, you usually have to sue them. Also, people sue over what statutes mean just as often as they sue in common-law situations.

Second: Suing over statutes can engender especially wasteful litigation. Litigants pay tens-of-thousands of dollars in legal fees fighting about what statutory words mean. They even fight over whether a statute’s silence about a circumstance has meaning, and they fight about what that meaning is.

At common-law, however, the legal fees are spent to obtain rulings to establish whether a particular activity is wrongful or okay under real-life circumstances. Often, that produces more useful results than spending legal dollars to prove what a statute’s words mean.

The upshot: Both statutes and the common-law engender equal volumes of litigation, but litigating common-law rights is a more efficient and effective use of those legal dollars.

Third: Suppose that in your state, landowners had common-law rights to sue trespassers on their land. Then, the legislature abolished all common-law trespass rights. That made it legal to trespass on all private property. And suppose that it became commonplace and even traditional during most of a century for passersby to walk across and even encamp on each others’ land. Then, the legislature restored common-law rights to sue for trespass. Would that generate litigation? Of course it would. Does that mean that restoring private property rights against trespass shouldn’t happen?

When the legislature outlawed drunken driving, that yielded litigation, too. Does our distaste for litigation mean that we shouldn’t outlaw drunken driving?

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Pulitzers lost, what a cost: Fourth in a series on the impact of thousands of job cuts at America's newspapers

Janet Reeves was the force behind the extraordinary photo department of the Rocky Mountain News. It was my privilege to work with her for 17 years. She led her staff to three Pulitzers: one for Columbine, one for the worst summer of forest fires in Colorado history, and one for "Final Salute," perhaps the most powerful story the paper ever told. (Final Salute also won the Pulitzer for feature writing.) Anybody who worked with her would tell you that her drive and commitment, her passion for excellence, made it happen. Now she's out of a job. I don't believe there's a newsroom in America she wouldn't make better.

This series explores the impact of thousands of journalists losing their jobs by asking some of those who have shown themselves capable of producing work of the highest caliber - winners of the Pulitzer Prize who are no longer at a newspaper - for their reflections on what happened to them and how they view the future.

1. Name, final paper.

Janet Reeves, Rocky Mountain News

2. What work did you winner Pulitzer for, when?

2000 Pulitzer for Breaking News Photography, coverage of "Columbine tragedy." Staff award

2003 Pulitzer for Breaking News Photography, coverage of "Colorado wildfires." Staff award

2006 Pulitzer for Feature Photography, editor on Todd Heisler's "Final Salute," for which Jim Sheeler was also awarded the Pulitzer for feature writing.

3. Why did you leave your newspaper? When?

The Rocky Mountain News was closed Feb. 27th , 2009.


4. What are you doing now? Any reflections on life after newspapers?

It would be nice or even poetic to write how I'm enjoying my time away from journalism, exhaling a bit and re-discovering myself on my induced sabbatical. But I can't and won't. I do resent being put on the sidelines of a career I cherished and thrived in. Having said this, I can truthfully say that about four months after the closure I indeed recognized within myself how rested and fresh I felt and so ready to jump back into the game. Recognizing that the game has many new looks and moves to it. I also feel like I have grown, living this unemployed experience along with so many others. I guess since I am a trained observer of people it is no surprise that I watch folks in all walks of life (even more so than before) and wonder how they exist, what they do for a living, could I do that? Are they happy? What would make me happy and fulfilled? I have enjoyed and been inspired by my former colleagues at the Rocky, trying new paths and taking chances.

5. What do you hope to do going forward? Will you stay in journalism? How?

So what am I doing? I am like a one woman job fair. I have traveled the country, chatting with the wonderful colleagues and friends I have come to know over the years. I have attended photo festivals, judgings and conferences where I seek advice, throw out ideas and look at great images and listen to the journalists' stories......reminds you that what we do as photojournalists and journalists is alive and necessary. I truly hope that I can weather this storm and find my new direction and remain connected to journalism. I feel I have so much left to give to our profession and to learn. I feel like a hungry bear coming out of hibernation.

6. What has the downsizing of your former newsroom or closing of your former paper meant to the quality of journalism in your community? For example, are there types of stories not being told? You could use your own experience to provide examples here.

I know the community of Denver, Colorado and journalism mourns our passing. They have told me, and not just to pass on false sympathies but to express the loss of the voices, photos and news that they trusted. Why was it that so many Americans trusted Walter Cronkite? The 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News had the same effect for many readers. They came to us to learn, experience and forge their own opinions from our stories and photographs. The Rocky is gone and many readers believe they lost something personal that day. Yes, they will move on to other venues just as the nightly viewers of Walter Cronkite had to, but an era of trust and familiarity dies.
Denver will, no doubt, never be a two-newspaper town again. Competition is a wonderful thing that keeps all involved sharp, accurate and driven. I hope that the online news of today's media markets can keep Denver's traditional news media (papers, magazines, radio and TV) on point.

7. What, if anything, do you think your newspaper should have done differently to prevent the downsizing or closure that cost you your job?

I find fault with the publishers and owners of American newspapers, not just currently, but 10-15 years ago. They demonstrated little foresight or vision for the future. If they did hold workshops for themselves and employees on how to survive and re-invent themselves before they became outdated, they certainly didn't listen or care much past their profit margins. That group demonstrated in the last few years how little American journalism and the whole Fourth Estate theory means to them.
Having said this, my own experience tells me that at the Rocky we were trying very hard for years always to reinvent. Design, voices, technology, web, online multimedia, Yourhub.com, Olive (e-edition) and even the experiment in the late 80's early 90's with an online version known as the a la carte edition. We used so many different vehicles to try to stay ahead and meaningful to our readers. The fickle reader has some blame here as well. Take something for granted and it will disappear.

8. What would you advise young people wanting to pursue a life in journalism today?

The new trends on how we gather, distribute and communicate information are just the pipelines. We are in phase, a really major sea change, but I optimistically believe people will seek out the unbiased truth, the storytelling images that shape our world and realize that they will not be satisfied with what they see from their neighbor's cellphone or an unknown twitter or blogger. In fact they will demand it. So my advice to a young person considering a life in journalism is go for it, but don't replicate the past. Create your future. Guess I'll try to listen to my own advice!!

Final note: If you know of others who should be asked to participate in this series, please let me know. Thank you.
John Temple

A call to journalists who've left newspapers: Share how you reinvented yourself

My series, "Pulitzers lost, what a cost," prompted a great suggestion from a reporter I worked with at the Rocky Mountain News.

"The business is changing. Delivery is changing. Jobs aren't coming back. And if we don't have a masters, we're not going to be teaching at a university level. We have to completely reinvent ourselves. That's what I'd like to read about. All the journalists who got downsized and created a new life for themselves," Judi Villa wrote me.

So consider this a request for submissions. If you're a journalist who has reinvented yourself and want to share your experience with others, please send me a short column on how you did it and what you learned. I'm looking for 300-400 words. A picture of you in your new role would be much appreciated.

I welcome input on how best to execute the idea. I'll figure out how to present these after seeing how many submissions I get initially.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Pulitzers lost, what a cost: Third in a series on the impact of thousands of job cuts at America's newspapers

The loss of thousands of jobs at American newspapers comes at a cost for society, for journalism and for journalists. This series explores the dimensions of the loss by asking journalists who have shown themselves capable of producing work of the highest caliber - winners of the Pulitzer Prize who are no longer at a newspaper - for their reflections on what happened to them, what it's meant and how they view the future.

Today's subject, Kim Komenich, won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography for his coverage of the fall of Ferdinand Marcos. He left the San Francisco Chronicle in April.






1. Name, age, final paper. Kim Komenich, 52, The San Francisco Chronicle.

2. What work did you winner Pulitzer for, when? The Philippine Revolution, 1987, Spot news photography.

3. Why did you leave your newspaper? When? I left my job as staff photographer/videographer on April 3, 2009. In 1987 Ken Light asked me to teach a documentary class at the San Francisco Academy of Art. I really enjoyed it and I decided that I'd try to dedicate one of my days off to teaching. In 1998 I took a two-year academic leave from my job at the San Francisco Examiner to work on my masters and to teach the picture story class at the University of Missouri. When I returned in 2000 I knew that when my newspaper days were over I'd probably move into teaching. I assumed that like those who had gone before me I'd put in 30-35 years shooting at the Chron before hanging 'em up. Then things started to implode. I wasn't able to finish my master's project while I was in Missouri. Looking back at it, I'm happy things worked out the way they did. Had I finished it in 2000, I would now have a masters with an emphasis on print photojournalism. Because I finished it in 2007, the emphasis is on multimedia photojournalism. I was "tapped" for a Chronicle buyout in 2007. I was over-scale and probably a bit spacey after defending my masters. Dollar for dollar, I wasn't the most productive member of the staff at that point. I called some friends, and one comment came up again and again-- "you're a fire horse. You wouldn't know what to do with yourself if you didn't have a deadline and the satisfaction of seeing your work in print the next day." This round of conversations served as a gentle wake-up call. My friends urged me to turn down the buyout, but work toward the next step in my career. I did. Over the course of the next year I began to build a current teaching portfolio. I carefully collected the evaluation forms from classes and workshops I was teaching. I kept the thank-you letters from organizers of conferences and workshops where I had taught. Until then, all of these evaluations and thank-yous hadn't mattered because I still had my day job. It all hit the fan in mid-March. The Guild voted to give back 150 jobs and eliminate seniority. It was time to go, and I can honestly say that I enjoyed every bit of it - even the bittersweet final weeks. Of course I would have loved to have finished my career at the Chronicle, but it wasn't possible. The Guild had negotiated a great buyout package and, with a couple of signatures, I agreed to go Earlier in the year I put feelers out for possible full-time teaching jobs in the Bay Area. Dr. Michael Cheers mentioned that there was a tenure-track assistant professorship in multimedia at my alma mater, San Jose State University. The same weekend of the Guild vote I emailed my CV to the chair of the search committee. They asked me to come in for an interview on April 2. On April 3, I took my last staff picture for the Chronicle- a portrait of an Oakland Raiderette. A few weeks later I was offered the job at San Jose State. I've always told students that it's healthier to think of yourself as a photographer who happens to work for a newspaper, and not a "newspaper photographer." When I first said it I was stressing the preservation of the photographer's vision and spirit in the face of daily assignments. At this point in the evolution of photojournalism it might be that photographers who value their long-term projects might consider moving way from newspapers and into academia. Universities throughout the country expect their professors to "publish or perish," but some schools offer "creative research" as an alternative to publishing traditional scholarly articles. This means that at some schools you're teaching for nine months and producing documentary books films and exhibitions the rest of the year.

4. What are you doing now? Any reflections on life after newspapers? I gave myself the summer off from assignment photojournalism. In addition to teaching a video storytelling class, I worked as a sound recordist on a movie, I wrapped up the shooting on a basketball documentary, I shot a crowd-funded piece on childhood asthma for Newsdesk.org and did my best to wear out a pair of Tevas. I'm gearing up to teach classes in multimedia and visual journalism and I'm spending a fair amount of time preparing 30 hours of lectures for each class. I'm teaching workshops and I'm taking workshops. That's the one constant.

5. What do you hope to do going forward? Will you stay in journalism? How?
Until now, I've founded my career on a circle of three things: practice journalism professionally, then teach what I know, then go to schools and workshops to learn more so that I can practice journalism more effectively. This summer has differed in that it's more of a blur without the 40-hour-a-week journalism job, but I am finding that I'm still doing, teaching and learning. I suspect the journalism I do now won't be driven by assignments and "problem solving" for an editor. For the first time in my life I won't be making a living as a photojournalist. I'll be able to fund my work through my teaching and in the process, I hope, I'll be able to move more sincerely into documentary photography and filmmaking.

6. What has the downsizing of your former newsroom or closing of your former paper meant to the quality of journalism in your community? For example, are there types of stories not being told? You could use your own experience to provide examples here.
When you think about it, newspapers are a lot like any industrial-age industry. In our case, the "factory" is the newspaper and the printing plant. For a long time, newspapers were the information technology. Then came radio, then television, then the internet, the Web and now social media. It's possible that the idea of a daily newspaper has run its course - I hope not, but what if it has? Will there come a day when ink-on-paper delivery will actually be considered an obstacle to getting the highest quality journalism into the hands of the greatest number of people? Every newspaper journalist has to be mourning their own golden era of journalism, a time when they really hit their stride. In my case it was a time when the readership, and by extension, the advertising base, would support the time and the travel for the stories I would pitch that would put me in a zone where I could put the puzzle together in a way that I could surprise myself. This era coincided with a time when newspapers were thought of as a community institution - a part of daily life. Not only would they inform and entertain us, they would sponsor community events and charities. They would show us the way, or get us mad enough that we would find our own way. Newspapers were a daily source of motivation. I think they still serve that purpose, but with smaller news holes and fewer reporters and photographers in the field, they can't be as thorough or as thought-provoking.

7. What, if anything, do you think your newspaper should have done differently to prevent the downsizing or closure that cost you your job? I came into the business at the height of the "offset revolution." I was a disciple of W. Eugene Smith and Henri Cartier-Bresson, who thought he had missed the boat when Life Magazine ceased publication. My generation channeled our energy and our vision into newspapers at a time when new offset printing technology allowed newspapers to publish brilliant color advertising. This expansion created a hunger for a new photojournalism, a bigger way of telling stories, in color as well as black-and-white, that became my Life Magazine. A confluence of things - the economy, an exploding cable TV market, a shifting reader demographic and internet news - formed a perfect storm that began unraveling the newspaper's role as town crier. To those of us in the trenches it was a matter of applying new technologies to our storytelling with the hope that we'd help save our papers. This doesn't really address the question. Of course there were missteps. The news has to pay for itself. The idea of a wire service is industrial-age, print-era thinking. In the digital age, as we have seen, such a service can be used by competitors who will use your own stories to drive you out of business. My experience is that downsizing was inevitable, and that at the point I left the Guild and the Chronicle had came up with the most compassionate way to reduce the staff. With time I've come to see that my experience with the downsizing at the Chronicle wasn't traumatic. If anything, it was the kick in the pants I needed to move on to my other passion. In looking back at it, I realize I've been preparing to teach for nearly two decades and through the buyout, I've been able to move on.

8. What would you advise young people wanting to pursue a life in journalism today? I'm shifting professions so that I can be of service to those who know they must be journalists. As a student, I found there were always two kinds of "veteran" journalists - those who wanted to share everything with you and those who wanted to discourage you in the hope it would save you some pain. I found that it was valuable to listen to both sides of the argument and then to spend additional time with those who expected you to stand on their shoulders. Will the next generation of journalists go to work at a "factory" like I did? A few will. I expect that many of them will become much more self-sufficient than I ever was. I think the era of sustainable journalism is here. The stories will be told in more dimensions than ever before thanks to emerging technology. New ways of paying for journalism are being invented every day. It's a matter of entrepreneurship from here on.

Final note: If you know of others who should be interviewed for this series, please let me know. Thank you.