Dispatches from Andyland

It seems in the past month or so, newspapers have been making some noise that they are going to start charging for at least some of the content. One of the reports I heard about for boston.com was that people were considering charging for the content found in the Boston Globe, and leaving the rest as available to all readers.

That got me thinking about how much of what gets read from boston.com is Globe content, and also about how that may have changed over the years. I started thinking how traffic gets to the article pages anyway, and to a great extent the biggest traffic driver to an article page seems to be the homepage. This could be something I could measure, how much of the boston.com homepage is allocated to links to Boston Globe articles, and how much of it is from other sources. And has it changed over time. (My assumption was that Globe content would increase around 2006 when the boston.com and Boston Globe editorial departments became more closely integrated, and Globe reports started writing more direct to online content. Before that, the sense that I got was that Globe content was frequently highlighted for its unique view, but when news of the day changed from what was published the night before, the site started putting more up to the minute wire content from AP or Reuters.)

So I grabbed every copy of the boston.com homepage that existed on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. I wrote a small script that would read each file and judge each link to be either a Globe link, a non-globe link, or one that didn’t count (I omitted things links to other section fronts like the news, sports, etc. pages.) I called a link a Globe link if it either was within a section of Globe content (/dailyglobe2/world/…) or the tease associated with the link had an attribution of “(Boston Globe)” or “(Today’s Globe)” I ran my script over all the homepages, put the results into a spreasheet to graph them and found….

Practically no difference in the ratio of Globe content vs. other content from about 2001 through 2008 (the last dates that the wayback machine has data.) Now I’m wondering what to do next. There may be something that I’m missing (I’m counting any link with a greater relevancy over another, even though links “above the fold” tend to get clicked on more than links near the bottom.) It could be the script I wrote to parse the homepage into globe/noglobe links isn’t counting things accurately. Maybe the data is right, but I should start playing around with it in r just to learn it.

Oh well, I was looking forward to publish the results that supported my hypothesis. Saying that I can’t support it isn’t nearly as much fun, but I figure its as much of a story to tell as the other.

I just read about a site called The Book Seer which does book recommendations. So I went back through the last three books that I finished (which were all very different from each other, so I wanted to see how it would respond:

Fun Home oddly enough couldn’t get any book recommendations from Amazon. Some of the recommendations it did find seemed to be geared more on its graphic novel-ness and less on its content (can someone see a connection Frank Miller’s Sin City and  Alison Betchel’s Fun Home besides they both have lots of pictures?)

Angels & Demons suggested most of Dan Brown’s other works, which isn’t very surprising. (my brother lent it to me well before the movie came out, and it just reached the priority level in the pile. We were discussing Bruce Scheier’s post about Hacking a Papal Election and the connection between security and tradition. I also meant to read it before I saw the film, but now its too late, at least for the theaters.)

Sacred Attunement was the oddest of all though. I got a whole bunch of recommendations labeled “attribute error at line …”.

Huffington Post had a story earlier today Franken’s First Time Around: Comedian-Turned-Senator Questioned “Clarence Thomas” In 1991 SNL Sketch and it occured to me: Every time Franken does something, somebody is going to drag out an old SNL sketch about the subject. If he does something on health care, people will drag out the “Brain Tumor Comedian” bit. Does something about aging and people will pull out some appropriate Stuart Smalley piece.

I’m not all that familar with the current cast; When SNL spoofs a senate committe hearing, who are they going to pick to play Franken?

Last night  (July 13, 2009) The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson,  Connie Schutz was a guest. She talked a bit about journalism a bit:

I’ve been writing about this lately. I think  there might be somewhat of a solution. In fact as I was riding in today there was a, a judge ruled … there was a court ruling in February. Basically what I’m saying is these bloggers; (to Furgeson)You know bloggers, you and I have so much fun with bloggers. They tend to take our work for free and they interfere with our advertising rates online and stuff. I’m worried about copyright law. We’re working to change it. I feel like I’m rambling and here is what I’m trying to say. Today there was a court case for the AP, actually the court case was in Februrary, a judge said ‘yeah, you know what blog aggregators, you can’t just take their work for free’ and today they settled out of court for a large amount of money, which is really good news.

Saying that most blogs are copyright infringement seems out of line. Although it does exist, its a small minority of some rarely read blogs. Its actually not all that hard to find them, either. Here are all the people who copied Connie Schutz articles. (there are a few false positives in there, but if you searched once a day,week,month and kept your eye out for new articles that weren’t there in before, you could wind up with a reasonably small set of cease and desist letters to send out each time period.) I can see how the argument could apply to news aggregators (Google news, Drudge Report, etc.) but are bloggers really the problem?

My second problem is that the “Hot News Doctrine“,she’s talking about changing copyright law (but giving no details on how) while at the same time showing how existing law and legal decisions seem to be succeeding at what she wants.

And to show how dedicated she is to copyright law itself (and not just how it can be expanded to help make her employer more money) just before that speech quoted above she pointed out this Huffington Post page: Craig Ferguson’s Best Musical Numbers: Which Is Your Favorite? (VIDEO) (POLL) which has a bunch of youtube clips of the show which are obviously copyright infringement. (CBS doesn’t upload their content to Youtube, they have the own video playback and embedding service on cbs.com) This maybe only slightly mitigated by the fact that Craig said during this segment that he didn’t care what got posted from the show after it aired. (“They can have mine. I don’t care. I do it, it’s done.” although I’m not sure he has all of the rights to the content to tell anyone that.) What a way to practice what you preach.

So I went to her web site at cleveland.com and found her recent articles. In them she does indeed talk about news agregator services and not blogs themselves. (she must have a good editor) In Tighter copyright law could save newspapers she is pointing to a lawyers wanting minor changes copyright to make the hot news doctrine stronger. She has a followup article Idea that would help save newspapers makes bloggers howl where she picks a couple of the most outlandish rebuttles and takes them down as straw men. (most articles I found referencing the article were much more measured than the two she decided to use as examples.)

Unfortunately, although I want to see journalism find its way into the future, I’m really annoyed that yet another group of content publishers wants to further restrict copyright and take uses of the work that were once legal. The movie studios wanted the DMCA and got it. The music publishing industry wanted the Sony Bono Copyright Act and got it. Now Ms. Schutz want to encourage the newspaper industry to encourage further restrictions.

Are the newspapers going to hold themselves to the same standard? When bloggers break a story will web sites run by newspapers wait for the original author to derive a competitive benefit from it?

Update:

I guess I somehow missed the party as it was going on. Tonight I read about the pipsqueaks comment from the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s reader representitive, etc.

… but why would someone post a link to “about:blank“?

One time Penn Jillette was recounting an anecdote on his radio show. He was on an airplane and then boarding after him was a notable stand up comic. After greeting each other, the comic started asking questions about his career. “How many times did you do the Tonight Show? “Oh about three or four times so far”. “How many appearances on Letterman? Your New York show, is that on Broadway or an off-Broadway show” After answering his questions the comic muttered, “just great. If this plane goes down, the article will read ‘Penn Jillette comedian and magician noted for his Broadway show and his late night talk show appearances died in a plane crash. Also on board was …”
A slightly different collection of on screen credits and Jillette would have been related to the “also on board was magician Penn Jillette and and 175 other passengers.”

A slightly different collection of credits, and Farrah Fawcett’s passing would be all over the news tonight. Ed McMahon and David Carrodine are off of everyones notice entirely.

I got told one of those “all of the other kids…” lines and I responded with “if all the other kids jumped off a bridge, would you?”
The reply I got was “if all the other parents used the same lame analogy, would you?”