Journalism and blogging in the digital age
In August, Ian Shapira wrote an article in the Washington Post about how the popular web site, Gawker, lifted parts of an article he’d written and reprinted them without his permission, without proper accreditation and without any financial compensation. At first, he was flattered that Gawker took an interest in his story, and was delighted with the wider online audience that his story received. But after some reflection, he changed his tune.
The original article (1,500 words) required about seven hours of research, and another full day to write. Gawker spent “half an hour to an hour” condensing it and lifting the juicy bits for its own web site. As a professional courtesy, the Washington Post was given a link at the end of the article.
Gawker also sold ads around the re-packaged article, which generated more than 9,500 page views. I don’t know what kind of revenue 9,500 page views brings in, but it all went into Gawsker’s pockets, not the Washington Post’s.
This type of aggregation of news and information has become the norm at sites like Gawker, Google News and Digg. These sites scrape information from the web and make it available on their own sites. Sometimes the articles are re-written by staffers (Gawker), sometimes they are collected automatically (Google News), and sometimes they are submitted by the public (Digg).
In any case, the Shapira story raises important questions about where journalism is going in the digital age, how information is gathered and distributed online, and who profits from the repackaging of that information.
As news organizations downsize, there are fewer journalists doing the hard slogging of gathering news and researching stories. It goes without saying that fewer journalists means fewer original stories.
This begs the question: Who is going to fill up the void once the journalists start to disappear? Who is going to hold the politicians and business leaders to task once the beat reporters start dropping off? According to Mark Bowden, that task appears to be falling to special interest groups and bloggers.
In a recent Atlantic article, Bowden cites an example of how bloggers have already started to fill the void. This past May, President Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court. At that time, all of the major news networks had an opportunity to conduct due diligence on Sotomayor.
The reporter who discovered the rare video clips of Sotomayor making controversial comments from years earlier wasn’t a high-priced journalist from CNN or CBS. In fact, he wasn’t even a reporter. It was a man named Morgan Richmond, a part-time blogger, who spends his evenings scouring the Internet looking for stories and ideas.
The clips that Richmond found eventually made their way into the hands of major news organizations and were played over and over again. As much as I admire Richmond’s tenacity as a journalistic sleuth, his underlying agenda was really to shed a negative light on Sotormayor and perhaps try to influence public opinion against her. (Sotormayor was eventually confirmed as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the U.S. by a unanimous vote by the senate).
These new trends in journalism – fewer working journalists, the repacking of news stories to niche audiences, and bloggers pretending to be journalists – have become a reality in the digital age.
I don’t know if these trends represent the future of journalism, but I’m sure that news organizations everywhere are studying these developments closely.
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If Ian Shapira had written that story in, let’s say, The National Post, (in Canada), he could sue Gawkers. Copyright laws are very different in Canada, than the United States. (Libel laws are also). This is a case he would most likely win. But Gawkers lifting a story from the Washington Post — a Blogging site lifting from a reputable newspaper — poses an unhealthy shift in where people are getting their news. As more and more people rely on computers for their news, mainstream newspapers and more importantly, journalists will be no longer, as this Blog points out. Heck, some American newspapers have stopped printing and just do an on-line edition. As a former newspaper editor-in-chief, I find this shift from paper to computer screen very unsettling, but inevitable, I think.