When kleptomaniacs collide: Old media declares war on new media

The sheer onion-ness of President Obama’s Nobel win yesterday has deflected international attention from the fact that a conference of media Canutes had just declared war on the Interwebs. The announcement came at a three day “world media summit” between Western media elites and Communist cadres that Japanese Kyodo News dubbed “Beijing’s Media Olympics”. Among others, Associated Press’s CEO Tom Curley and News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch joined Chinese leader Hu Jintao on stage in the Great Hall of the People to denounce the people for the way they used media content. (photo of Internet pioneer Vinson Cerf by centralasian)

Today, that bastion of free media, the Chinese state press agency Xinhua, published the full text of the World Media Summit Joint Statement. The Forbidden City conference theme of “Cooperation, Action, Win-Win and Development” was a signal that management doublespeak lay ahead. Most of the sentences failed Bill Easterley’s not-test of summit outcomes. The not-test asks whether it is possible to negate it and create a sentence that a sane person would utter. Who, for instance, would NOT hope that “media organisations around the world will provide accurate, objective, impartial and fair coverage of the world's news events.” There was nothing in the bland communiqué that suggested war was on its way.

But many of the media leaders at the conference departed from the prepared script. The boss of AP passed Easterley’s not-test with flying colours by saying many sentences that sane people will disagree with. For Tom Curley the problem was nothing less than regaining control from “crowd-sourcing Web services” such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook, search engines and blogs. They were all hurting his business model but he was not going to take it lying down. Curley said AP would “no longer tolerate the disconnect” between those who gather the news and those who “profit from it without supporting it."

78-year-old Rupert Murdoch was equally bellicose about the future. He described fellow conference invitee Google as “parasites” who make money off traditional media. He said the “philistine phase” of the digital age was almost over and “the aggregators and plagiarists” will soon be forced to pay for “the co-opting of our content." He saw the contest as a battle to the death between content creators “the people in this hall” and “content kleptomaniacs”.

But Murdoch needs to remember content kleptomania is a two-way sword. In August, his own Sky News weren’t initially keen to pay for using an eye-witness picture to a London police shooting a citizen journalist named Joe Neale had posted on Twitpic. It was not until Neale tweeted to the world “Newscorp use your photos without permission but have plans to charge for reading their content” that they came to the party and paid him £330.75.

New media won this particular battle but it will be harder to win the war. Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff said this week in Vanity Fair war is Murdoch’s natural state. The enemy is the Internet. When Wolff explained to Murdoch a news aggregator business he is involved with, the media mogul said “so you steal from me”. Wolff said Murdoch did not understand the Internet and his online investments were all failures (Delphi, iGuide, Myspace, Pagesix.com). Murdoch runs his business not on the basis of giving the consumer what he wants but through more old-fashioned methods of structural market domination. Wolff called him “a scold who can intimidate the market into doing what he wants it to do.”

Weston Kasova at Newsweek was unimpressed with the scolding Murdoch and Curley dished out at the Beijing conference. He called it “macho outrage” which was calculated to be quotable but is fake. Kasova said aggregators actually draw audiences towards traditional media sites and their advertisers. News Corp and AP could shut off this traffic with one small piece of code (User-agent: Googlebot. Disallow: /) but of course they don’t do it. “They'd rather blame someone else for their failure to compete in a changing marketplace,” says Kasova pointedly.

Link economy advocate Jeff Jarvis at Buzz Machine also condemned the “Proletariat of the Press”. He said the Beijing conference was a “suicidal attempt to protect outmoded models and fight the future”. Jarvis prefers a different template of the future based on “new efficiencies, specialization, targeting, [and] value that comes with the collaboration that the internet and its links enable.” It was the “irresponsible stewardship over journalism” that was killing newspapers not the Internet. “We are not kleptomaniacs,” said Jarvis. “We are the new (free) distribution.”

US media academic Robert McChesney puts the question more pointedly in a rare old media act of contrition from Le Monde Diplomatique. McChesney wondered when the debate took place which ratified large corporations as the guardians of American media. “When, exactly, did Americans approve of the idea that a handful of corporations selling advertising were the proper stewards of the media or that it was inappropriate to ever question their power?” he asked. “When had the American people ratified the corporate media system as the proper one for the United States?” The answer is, of course, “before the Internet arrived”.

Let the war commence.

AP threatens web users who quote their articles

The world’s biggest newswire agency Associated Press said yesterday it would sue websites that use its members' articles without permission. Speaking at the company’s annual meeting in San Diego, California AP chairman Dean Singleton threatened to "pursue legal and legislative actions" against websites that do not properly license news content. He said AP would develop a system to track its online content (as well as the content of its 6,700 fee paying member newspapers) to determine whether it is being legally used. "We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories," said Singleton. In a complementary press release Singleton riffed off Peter Finch’s character Howard Beale in Network “We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any more.”

In an interview with Paidcontent.org’s Staci Kramer, Singleton expanded on AP’s proposed new rules of engagement. He said the media industry had been “timid” about protecting content, in the good times and “didn’t recognise that misappropriation is as serious an issue as it is”. In these tougher times, Singleton said they must protect the rights of their content “We own the content but we’ve let those who spend very little, if any, get the most advantage from it,” he said.

Kramer said AP already had an aggressive reputation with lawsuits on aggregating content and intellectual-property protection “so the idea of suing isn’t new.” But despite Singleton’s threats, it is not yet clear who his targets might be. Google signed a deal three years ago with AP or the use of its stories and photographs. Google claimed it was for a product that complemented Google News not Google News itself (though to my knowledge no such product yet exists in the public domain). However this deal expires at the end of 2009 and AP may be putting in an ambit claim for future negotiations. But as TechDirt points out, Google News drives traffic to news providers' sites, where they're free to monetise that traffic however they see fit.

In any case, it will prove difficult under US fair trade laws to persuade news aggregation websites that they should pay for content they are currently getting for free. It is this “fair use” application that Singleton calls a “misguided legal theory”. AP already has form in this area. Last year, they announced what they called a “quotation licence” for bloggers and journalists for use of AP articles. The fees start at $12.50 for quotations of 5-25 words and rise to $100 for over 251 words. Boing Boing called it an attempt “to replace the established legal and social order with a system of private law”.

But given how impractical these conditions, perhaps what AP may really be after is a guarantee that their originating story appears first in a Google search about the content. AP’s director of strategic content, Jim Kennedy, gave an example of the problem to Forbes. "When the Red River in Fargo rises, we want to people to go to the Fargo Forum. But searching for the Red River on Google might also send you to the London Telegraph."

But Kennedy also acknowledged that AP should accept some responsibility for directing traffic to its member sites. He said they are developing software that improves tags and, also crucially, tracks content. This latter functionality will assist AP find out who is using their content that shouldn’t be. The main culprits are the search engines and blog sites who use (and link to) AP content on a regular basis. But as MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka says, stopping this traffic won’t do anything to solve the underlying problems affecting AP’s business. Kafka notes three basic issues 1) too much undifferentiated information 2) the disappearance of classified and local retail advertising and 3) debt-ridden investors who have paid too much for media assets in the last decade.

Roy Greenslade says Google and bloggers are not going to go away. He believes the news agencies need to find an accommodation with them “to ensure journalism survives”. Peter Kafka also points out the dangers of quoting Howard Beale: “You are aware [he] gets shot to death at the end of the movie, right?”