Commentary

News Corp, AP Take On 'Content Kleptomaniacs'

by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer, October 9, 2009

News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch is now condemning online aggregators as "content kleptomaniacs" who threaten to put news companies out of business.

Speaking at a media industry conference in Beijing, he urged more publishers to start charging for content, warning that otherwise content creators will "pay the ultimate price" while the so-called content kleptomaniacs win.

Tom Curley , CEO of The Associated Press, piled on. "Random distribution of traffic by aggregators such as search engines directs audience and revenue away from those who invest in original news reports but assures the aggregators and their ad networks of a stream of revenue," he said. "Crowd-sourcing Web services such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook have become preferred consumer destinations for breaking news, displacing Web sites of traditional news publishers."

For News Corp. and the AP to repeatedly cast search engines and aggregators as enemies is superficial and short-sighted. It's also pointless. Just ask the record labels whether the decision 10 years ago to vilify Napster helped the industry.

Besides, search engines and other Web services are -- or should be -- a boon to news companies. Search engines have allowed people to discover new publications, while newspapers get exposure, traffic and potential ad revenue.

Also, it's safe to say that reporters and editors at every News Corp. property and AP bureau rely on Google, Facebook, Twitter and the like when researching and reporting stories. Reporters on deadline don't need to wait for a librarian to dig up old research, or use a paid database, when they can gather information through Google or Yahoo.

Earlier this week, the AP floated a puzzling plan to charge some online publishers a premium to get access to stories for 20 or 30 minutes before they're distributed broadly. Who would pay a premium for an "exclusive" AP story that will cease to be exclusive the minute it goes live? After all, once people learn of news, there's no way to stop them from repeating it -- whether they do so by phoning their friends, emailing links, Twittering a 140-character summary, or rewriting the story and distributing it on their own Web sites. That's simply what people do with important news. And if people don't care about the news enough to want to spread it, then it probably isn't worth all that much, anyway.

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6 comments about "News Corp, AP Take On 'Content Kleptomaniacs'".

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Jim Courtright from Big Thinking By The Hour, October 9, 2009 at 5:41 p.m.
Big Media is right. They can't survive giving away their product. Their product is content. Created by hardworking reporters, editors, and fact checkers. They need to charge for that content or they will not survive.
Unfortunately, those hard working reporters, editors, and fact checkers no longer need Big Media to distribute their content. They have the Internet. So Big Media is about to be disintermediated.
There will always be a need and a market for good content.
There is no longer room for Big Media delivering it.
My money is on the content creators. The new model will arise and the content creators will get paid. Just not by Big Media.
Jim Courtright
Partner
Big Thinking By The Hour, Inc.
Reply

Brian Hayashi from ConnectMe 360, October 9, 2009 at 5:52 p.m.

Your Napster analogy is flawed in that there is a difference in how fungible news articles are versus music. Napster dealt in whole songs, sometimes albums, usually at 128Kbit fidelity.

News stories can be repackaged differently than music: to use your example, it is possible to simultaneously encourage people to tweet links *and* charge for content at the same time. They are not mutually exclusive, as your post suggests.

Under the approach Murdoch favored at the time he purchased Dow Jones, the freemium version would be an abbreviated USA Today-style story, with subscribers getting the longer version with greater reportage and additional opportunities to interact.

Don't get me wrong: I love free news for the same reason I love Hulu.com. But I also know that lots of people drink deeply from the #Free Kool-Aide to the extent that they're unwilling to consider where they might, God forbid, actually be making a flawed assumption.

Just because people say something in a focus group doesn't mean it's necessarily so.

Dan Mckillen from HealthDay, October 9, 2009 at 6:07 p.m.

Your question - Who will pay a premium for an "exclusive" AP story that they get 20 - 30 minutes before anyone else?

My first wild guess would be every brokerage house on Wall Street, for openers. It may only take a few minutes for the exclusive information to be verified and passed along to non-subscribers and then vetted again. But financial portfolios can be adjusted in a matter of minutes based on AP's breaking news and leave those firms that were too dependent on social media and other secondary sources to make much more expensive portfolio adjustments at unfavorable prices. AP is smart to do this, particularly with news that can move markets.

Jonathan Mirow from BroadbandVideo, Inc., October 9, 2009 at 6:38 p.m.

More sour grapes from the dinosaurs. We told you guys YEARS ago that this is what would happen. Did you listen? Nooooo - so now live with it. Brian, you snagged my line "Just because 8 people in a focus group in Des Moines liked this product doesn't make it so" (see one of my posts last week) - so you owe me money for using my content. I'm waiting for my money along with Rupert.

Chuck Lantz from 2007ac.com, 2017ac.com network, October 9, 2009 at 9 p.m.

I feel a certain amount of sympathy for the AP, but absolutely none for NewsCorpse. Since they insist on keeping Fox News as far away from actual journalism as possible, they deserve what they get in their other business divisions.

That said, the legitimate news services need to be paid for their efforts. We can't rely on the so-called "new media" to replace what some call the dinosaurs, simply because new media lacks the checks and balances that have been built up over many decades by organizations such as the AP. I wish I could suggest HOW they get paid, ... maybe some sort of auto-payment program, where users are charged small amounts via PayPal for time spent per minute on-site?

Angela Wilson from Angela Wilson Communications, October 10, 2009 at 10:34 a.m.

I continue to see stories where it is obvious AP and NewsCorp STILL don't understand social media - or how to use it properly. This is extremely sad, but not surprising. It was the same when I worked in news. They should be using these mediums to their advantage, not trying to tear them down.

If they truly believe search engines and social media are enemies, Bing, Google, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and the like MUST be banned from use by their employees for news stories. If they want to follow outdated news models, then they need to use outdated research techniques. Also, they cannot search for new talent using these mediums either.

To Jim Courtright - I think a new content/payment model is already on the rise. It will be interesting to see what the final model looks like - and how quickly it changes with new technology.