Per a recent presser, the National Newspaper Association supports the Journalism Protection and Competition Act, S 1094, to make large social media companies? and news aggregators? pay for using newspaper content. I oppose, partially but not entirely based on what's happening in Canada with its social media journalism law.
There are several issues here.
One, per what IS happening in Canada, Facebook et al are not "grabbing" your newspaper's story links. Rather, individual people are posting links. How do you address this? Related? The NNA presser says only "social media," which to me means Facebook, Twitter, etc., but, the law appears to point to search engines like Google and Bing and news aggregators like Google News and MSN. Can't NNA write a news release accurately? I quote:
Publishers asked Members of Congress to support two important journalism bills — the Journalism Protection and Competition Act, S 1094, to force large social media platforms to pay for the journalism they take from newspapers — and the Community News and Small Business Support Act, HR 4756, which would provide tax credits for small businesses to advertise in their local newspapers.
Oy. I do NOT consider Google News a "social media platform" and don't know who does. So, now that we're clear?
The bill itself is about Google and other search engines, first, and presumably Google News and similar aggregators, second. I think. This piece says that three entities fall under the distribution minimum size: Google, Google News and Facebook. (It's from the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, and, is about an earlier version of the bill; but I presume the same distribution size or similar applies.) So, we're back to the Facebook issue of, "it doesn't grab stories." Beyond that, per this Garbage Day Substack, on its algorithm and such, you're competing with weirdness at Facebook these days. (And competing with arbitrary whims, of course.)
Two, however you address that, what's a fair compensation level? I know it says "negotiations," but what happens if they simply stiff you?
Three, how tight is your paywall? If it isn't, why are you protesting? This is true whether we're talking about Google / Google News, or about Facebook et al.
Four, if you're a community newspaper of any size and get an attention-grabbing story out of the blue, like Marion, Kansas, how do you stop the MSNs and Yahoos of the world from re-running this, like their news aggregation with the wire services? If that's not airtightly clamped down, then it needs to be. From my time as a copy editor at a seven-day daily, I remember daily papers sending stories to AP but putting geographical restrictions on them.
The News Media Alliance has a presser about "myths vs realities." It's not bad, but I think it misses points, too.
If you don't want your stories on Facebook, make your paywall harder. If you don't want them on Google or Google News, get hard protection against your website being crawled. That simple. (At Nieman Lab, Joshua Benton wonders/fantasizes about what would happen if Google had a legit competitor.)
No comments:
Post a Comment