The Future of News? Does it even have one?
This (Washington Post) has more and more gotten to me. The story describes how Gawker (a news aggregator/abbreviator) basically excerpted the heck out of a Washington Post article. They took a story that was three days and several thousand dollars in the making, and cut in down in half an hour. They heavily excerpted the story, and barely attributed the source.
We have seen a lot of this already, traditional media outlets becoming at digital distributors, whether they be illicit, legit, or somewhere in between. P2P transactions from things like Bittorrent, Napster, Kazaa, etc. are of course illegal. So it’s easy to see why media companies don’t like them and are suing their users.
But what about a blogger/news-aggregation site that heavily excerpts news articles, runs ads on their page, and doesn’t properly cite their sources, does barely any original work, and doesn’t split ad revenue with the source? Most (including myself) would argue that this is still legal. Until you blatantly ignore copyright, you are staying within U.S. Law. These actions though are killing their food supply. Newspapers are on the decline. Digital news doesn’t bring in the same kind of revenue that the printed paper did (mainly from printed ads, but also from subscriptions). Soon, the real reporters out there will lose their jobs, and the amount of legitimate coverage of news will rapidly decline.
Sure, we’ll always have big issues being covered. People always want to know about things like presidential elections, sports, wars, large company takeovers, etc. But what will be the thoroughness of that coverage? If all you get is blogger coverage for some issues, a blogger who has no editor and does not (for the time being) have to exercise due diligence in their fact checking, what can you expect? Sure, we can have some aggregation sites filter for us, but that will only take us so far.
Local news is another story altogether that I won’t go into. But what do you think? Will there be a balance struck somewhere? Will the government decide that the news needs to be spread however it can, or do you think that congress will enact laws protecting original news sources from now? How will these laws work? Will they only require proper attribution at the top of a story? Will news sources own their work, or will they be forced to share as they are now?
I honestly can’t predict how this will turn out. My hope is that a healthy balance will be struck. I personally would like links to original news stories, but I also love the ability to have an aggregated and abbreviated reading if I so choose. I would say that I’m confident that people smarter and more capable than myself will work this out, but we’re talking about congress, and thus I have many doubts.