Alas for the poor newspaper industry.
It's becoming more and more difficult for those of the printed news industry. Revenues have been dropping consistently as more and more people get their news from online sources, not to mention the hit they take in classifieds thanks to site's like Craigs List. What are we to do?
Personally, I like newspapers, and I read them often. I spend my entire life looking at a computer screen and, while throughout the day I do get the majority of my news from the Internet, I still enjoy spending my mornings reading a newspaper article. The articles I enjoy the most in a newspaper are the investigative pieces. Then of course, there's the crossward puzzles I enjoy. And I always read the intellectual section (aka the comics).
But I also don't really read the national papers too much, preferring to read the local SunSentinel and Miami Herald instead (which is odd since, I usually only quickly glance over most of the local sections). And I can see how people are just not as happy with papers as they used to be.
I think the main problem with newspapers, in truth, is the fact that they are no longer carrying news, but rather yesterdays news. When a big story breaks, I get email alerts nearly instantly. If it interests me, I can read the story on a score of sites immediately. And those stores that aren't big enough to warrant and email alert...well, I check my aggregator sites at least 3 times a day. So in essence, when I want to know what's going on, I know it immediately. (not to mention I usually have NPR on all morning long)
With the paper, all I am getting is a regurgitation of the facts I already know. And the intellectual section. And I am by far not alone. So in essence, the newspaper is a simply a dying industry, unable to keep up with the rate of change of the world.
Yet, I also subscribe to several news magazines, both weekly and monthly. This is because they are articles, rather than news stories. News is the chronicle of events that occurred, articles allow a deeper research into the causes, backgrounds and surrounding issues around an event, along with opinion and thoughts of how the events may affect the future. This is why magazines, even news magazines, are more resilient to the change of pace of news: they have the time (even weeklies) to research, organize and report that a daily newspaper simply does not. Having a week to perform this is a lot more time than a day, so perhaps this is one area where newspapers still can't compete. And if so, again, they are simply a dying industry. It happens. New innovation destroys old industries. It's called capitalism.
But there are those who think that newspapers are too important to fail. If we don't have newspapers, who can we trust to give us unbiased news? (I don't know how often I can consider any story, article or segment unbiased, but that's not the real issue)
So if they are too important to fail, what can we do to save them? Obviously, stop that which is causing them to fail.
And with that, we reach a certain US Court of Appeals judge named Richard Posner. He has an argument in his blog that says, at the end, linking to news stories should be illegal:
"Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion" -- The Future of Newspapers, Becker-Posner Blog
What he suggests would then make what I just did illegal. Although he is mainly targeting aggregator sites, it would affect everything posted on a the Internet. In a global sense, imagine not being able to link to a product page of a web site because the description of the product is technically copyrighted.
This is ridiculous in the extreme. Laws should never be enacted (or expanded) to try to save a dying industry. This is anti American. Innovation leads to new products and services and that's what has kept America growing and leading the world. And copyright law, as it stand in this country, already stifles innovation. It is built now to keep corporations from having to create new when they can rely on old. There's that new and old comparison again.
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