Michael Lindenberger's blog

The Associated Press has announced that it is willing to fight over the question of who owns the content its member newspapers produce, even if it means no longer playing nice with the giants of the Web like Google.

On Monday, the AP announced that it would no longer allow news aggregators -- neither the big ones like Google and Yahoo!, nor the smaller, specialized sites -- to use its content without paying up. The announcement was made by William Dean Singleton, CEO of MediaNews Group, Inc., at the AP's annual meeting in San Diego. 

"We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work. . . . We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it anymore," Singleton said.

Details of how AP plans to enforce its new doctrine were not provided, and Google and other sites defended their practices. Google, which has recently included ads in its Google News search results (and thus competing directly with the companies whose content they aggregate) said what news aggregators always say: News orgs ought to be happy they aren't ignored.  

"We believe search engines are of real benefit to newspapers, driving valuable traffic to their Web sites and connecting them with new readers around the world," said Gabriel Stricker, a Google spokesman. "We believe that both Google Web Search and Google News are fully consistent with copyright law — we simply link users to the site at which the news story appears."   read more »

Bloggers in the Lone Star State are being left out of a law that would give journalists limited protection against subpoenas. The Texas House has passed overwhelmingly a bill that would let Texas join some 36 other states in erecting a shield for journalists who want to keep confidential information secret, even in the face of a subpoena. The bill (read the committee analysis here) awaits a vote in the state Senate, which voted last session to approve a similar bill, only to see that bill die on a technicality in the House, according to Emily Ramshaw of The Dallas Morning News.   read more »

I write a blog at my home newspaper, The Dallas Morning News, and when I get 10 or 20 comments on a post, I am feeling pretty good about myself. Arianna Huffington? Her site, Huffington Post, draws around a million comments a month.

I struggle with math, but I think that's a new comment every two and a half seconds. Not bad for a site that employs just five full-time reporters. Much of the content is provided by legions of unpaid contributors and the readers they've attracted.

But the site also features loads of professionally reported, often in-depth stories as well -- or at least large enough excerpts from those pieces that many readers may decide it's not worth it to read the original. It's this practice that has drawn scrutiny of late. Josh Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab (and, full disclosure: a former colleague of mine in Dallas) told TIME Magazine that "Someone is going to sue the Huffington Post. It's not just about the volume of the content that it appropriates, it's about the value."

The site may also be an attractive target, given that it's one of the few news sites -- or, given the sorry state of newspapers these days, one of the few news organizations -- that could be worth serious money.

How does all this work? Well take an example from today's HuffPo. Go to the site and find its AIG Big News page, a smartly packaged collection of news stories from other sites -- lots of them, all paid for by someone other than the Huffington Post.    read more »

The fights over whether blogging ought to be allowed during trials -- and whether it's good journalism -- aren't even over, and a new front has opened in the war over technology and its proper role in coverage of the justice system.

Last week, a federal district judge granted permission to a reporter from the Wichita Eagle to report on a trial using Twitter, the mini social network that allows users to shout out their whereabouts -- and anything else they can fit in a 140-character post -- quickly and easily.

The judge's OK -- he told defense attorneys, "Twitter is on" -- prompted news coverage from the AP and elsewhere, but it may strike some reporters and legal observers as less of an OMG moment, and closer to something like, "yeah, so?"   read more »

The question of what makes a journalist is due for yet another round of debate, now that Congress is weighing two competing versions of a federal shield law for reporters.

Last Friday, the Senate introduced its own version of the Free Flow of Information Act, a follow-up to the House's action two days before.  Both versions would provide new -- if limited -- protection against subpoenas for journalists, and both version contain a range of exceptions.  Both bills were introduced in 2007 as well, with the House version passing overwhelmingly despite a veto threat. The Senate bill was passed easily out of committee only to die without a vote of the full chamber as the session ran out of time.  (For details on the previous bills, see previous CMLP posts here, here, here, and here.) 

Again, the 2009 bills differ in a key respect, namely in how they define journalists. The Senate bill is fairly straightforward and generous in this regard. It covers a person "who is engaged in journalism," and defines the latter by:    read more »

As a young journalist, I remember listening with interest to colleagues recounting long-ago fights for the right to bring cameras into the court room. And while that battle hasn't been won everywhere, it appears nevertheless to be giving way to a new wave of concerns.

As blogger Arthur Bright lays out below, the push is on now for bloggers to not only attend trials but to report them live, blow by blow, on their blogs.This isn't entirely new -- bloggers covered the Scooter Libby trial, and by many accounts did a better job than the traditional media, at least in the daily coverage. 

Nevertheless, the performance of bloggers at that trial and others have left some media observers cold, leaving Bright to ask the question, "Is it journalism?"

As a journalist who has worked as a reporter and editor for tiny weekly papers, big-city dailies and enormous international newsweeklies -- and along the way did my share of blogging, too -- I'd like to say right away that of course it's journalism.  A blogger who writes quick sentences about news as it unfolds is operating as a journalist just as surely as Dan Rather and the other three big anchors were acting as journalists when they collectively held the nation's hands in the wake of 9/11 -- despite the fact that for long minutes of their coverage there wasn't anything new to report.    read more »

The fallout from the GateHouse v. New York Times settlement, anticlimactic as it was, has been fascinating, and deliciously exhaustive in the way that only Internet-based discussions of Internet-related issues can be.

But in rereading a large sample of those discussions, I came away with two questions that are still bouncing around inside my own head. Given that I've made a career out of writing about, whenever possible, what interests me rather than trying to predict what will interest readers, I'll hog a few kilobytes to flesh them out.

One issue got my journalist's blood flowing, and the other tickled my interest in media law. And well, with temps in Texas dropping to the freezing point, it's been a good evening for reading.

To begin with, if one non-litigious solution for Gatehouse was to have instead re-examined the role its headlines play, as David Ardia proposed in an early Q&A on the case, what does that suggest about the role of journalism itself in a Web-fueled, linked-up world?   read more »