While newspapers, it seems fun to find alternative news outlets.  Twitter gets lots of hype for being the newsroom of tomorrow. The most recent example is Twitter users being the first post about the LA earthquake.

But Twitter is not a newsroom. It’s not meant to be a newsroom. It helps news spread, but so do water coolers and and town criers.  But 140 characters of information doesn’t make a newsroom, but it helps the newsroom find news.

Newspapers are in trouble so looking for the next thing is a popular topic, but trying to anoint something as the “Future of…” is shortsighted. Twitter is still an experiment, one that doesn’t make money and gets crushed by its popularity. Twitter could be replaced by the next-big thing in a few months.

Twitter should, for now, be another tool in a journalists arsenal. A tweet alluding to an LA earthquake should send the journalist to their phone for confirmation.

News can be an bit of information, but a newsroom provides more. A newsroom needs to provide relevant information, context, what has happened, is happening, and will happen next. A tweet can’t provide that.  Even rapid fire wire services like AP and Reuters churn out several hundred words on events that happened minutes or hours before. Tweets might help cut that response time down.

The key difference is journalists should read Twitter. Everyone else will still read the journalists.

There’s been a parade of newspaper layoffs from these past few weeks, big and small, with cuts upwards of 10 percent of each paper’s workforce.  What’s puzzling is how constant layoffs are going to help the industry.  The philosophy seems to be charge more for less.  They’ve been trying this for almost ten years and yet here come more layoffs.

How are these layoffs meant to help the companies and industry?  Many leaving these papers are excellent journalists.  Why not have them write for the website?

Newspapers still view their websites as supplements to the paper rather than extensions of each other.  It’s frustrating going to a newspaper’s website looking for news and only finding the top stories from this morning, without links or ways to find more information.  All these people newspapers are laying off could be generating content, from blogs to exclusive articles that keep the website fresh and connected.  I can’t understand why all columnists and journalists don’t blog.

Newspapers aren’t dying.  Just big ones that charge too much for too little.  Free dailies have been steadily growing in the United States after years of success in Europe, helping bring in new readers who don’t read regular newspapers.

Newspapers need to plan long term.  That’s hard to do with investors watching every quarter, but no one’s going to be happy with another 10 years of plummeting revenue.  They should use the staff they already have, train them, and build quality on and offline news organizations.  Try offering more than less should be the first step.

The old guard of media have years of status and experience that make them seem more important. The Associated Press’ recent hoopla over links to its articles shows a disconnect from the old guard to the web world. Start-ups dream of getting some New York Times coverage because that would just set them up for success, but they ignore an article in TechCrunch or popular story on Digg might be more valuable.

Martin Varsavsky wrote for the Huffington Post about publicity his company Fon was getting. The New York Times featured him and his company on the cover of the Sunday business section followed by an article in Forbes magazine. But his website only saw 200 new uniques. A popular post on Digg netted him 50,000 uniques.

Varsavsky recognizes the benefits of print media - more resources, physical product, and established reputation. “Paper is more credible than pixels” he says. But if its traffic you need, old media won’t help you.

The Associated Press reminded me of this issue because, even as it whined about other websites sending it free publicity, the A.P. refused to link to other websites. It had no problem quoting them and saying the name of the blog, but wouldn’t include links to the quoted blog. The New York Times has recently started adding links, mostly to their blog and not their articles. Other mainstream media sites leave you the impression there’s nothing else on the web. Even new media companies like IMDB.com won’t provide links to sources, even when quoting them directly.

The issue is these links are incredibly valuable. The major tech blogs and aggregators, TechCrunch, Gigaom, Slashdot, and Digg to name a few, can bring a website down because of all the traffic they send. And once that traffic is on your site, it’s your job to keep them there. 2.3 million people read the Sunday times, but it’s a lot harder to get them to sign online and go to a website. With a link provided, you just click. Easy, no effort, effective.

Mainstream media needs to join the link culture. Linking to other sites isn’t just polite. Many sites (like Prodigeek) show links to sites linking to them. I’ve gotten reliable traffic from several blogs and that traffic inspires me to link to them more. Moreover, I don’t like to link to websites that don’t link at all (unless they’re the original source). I’d prefer to send traffic to other blogs who share in the link culture than news sites that don’t. And companies that are hostile to the link culture get blacklisted.

For companies trying to monetize their website, whether through sales, advertising, or something else, need to put their PR where the traffic is. That means publicize on the TechCrunches and Gigaoms and taste makers of your industry. The credible that comes from a Times article sounds nice, but it isn’t helping you meet traffic goals. As companies (hopefully) recognize this, blogs and websites will gain credibility as they become the next-generation of king-makers, discovering the next Googles, Microsofts, and Facebooks while the mainstream media plays catch up. Mainstream media needs to join the link culture (which includes not suing websites) or get left out and left behind.

Updated 6/24 1:37p.m. - I just read a great post by Chris Brogan on this same subject, noting how the Boston Globe wrote out the link to his blog on their website and newspaper, but didn’t link to it.

Last week I wrote about an unknown user who first reported Tim Russert’s death on Wikipedia. That “junior-level employee” worked for the Internet Broadcasting Systems who provides web services to NBC affiliates, has been suspended (earlier reports said fired, but NBC disputes this) for updating the Wikipedia page. The employee thought the information was public record.

Henry Blodget of Silicon Alley Insider wrote:

It’s one thing for a news organization to decide to delay reporting news of a staffer’s death out of deference to his or her family (this makes sense). It’s another for the organization to expect other organizations to follow the same policy. And it is yet another thing for someone to deliberately strike accurate facts from a collective record to appease an upset client, which is what someone at IBS apparently did.

The world has changed in last 15 years, and the genie isn’t going back in the bottle. If NBC wants to maintain its tradition with respect to staffers’ deaths, that’s fine. In the meantime, it should recognize that its chances of controlling a story this big are–and should be–infinitesimal and that “citizen journalism” has long since gone mainstream. If the employee at IBS who updated the Wikipedia entry did not learn of it via a confidential NBC communication, moreover, NBC and IBS owe him or her an apology and a job.(Emphasis his)

As Mathew Ingram writes “The lesson is that as long as there is news, people will try to share it. (Note: The NYT story says that NBC tried to hold back the news).”

As I said last week, Wikipedia provided rapid information while NBC took 40 minutes after Wikipedia to report Russert’s death. Information thanks to the internet moves faster. NBC can try to keep its exclusive stories, but it can’t be surprised if some younger, sprier website scoops it.

NBC announced yesterday Tom Brokaw will moderate Meet the Press during the election season, taking over for the recently deceased Tim Russert. The obvious benefits Brokaw are his decades of experience, headlining NBC Nightly News for more than 20 years. Steve Boriss of Future of News points out, this as a step backward.

NBC has decided to take a step backward, replacing Tim Russert with dino-anchor Tom Brokaw on Meet the Press. Actually, the decision was made for them because a step forward, or even a step to the side, does not exist. Network news is over.

Brokaw is an amazing journalist that my parents loved. And my grandparents. Network news wants raise its audience, but playing to the aging baby boomers is short term thinking (not to be too morbid here). There are several generations of people under 40 who don’t care about network news.

Brokaw is especially ironic in an election season pitting the old versus the new. John McCain and Hillary Clinton push the standard baby boomer sales pitches in an election season when Obama’s change mantra became as refreshing as a politician knowing how to use a computer. Tom Brokaw is network news answer to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

The problem is there isn’t a new generation of reporters to take over for Russert. Even if Brokaw is only temporary, there aren’t many options to replace him (Aaron Brown please?).  Few journalists today have the years of experience as foreign correspondents and hard news junkies that shaped the last generation of news anchors, giving us credible newsmen. NBC had to move backwards because there isn’t anybody in front.

The Associated Press has been kind enough to give bloggers more a week’s worth of posts with all its antics bullying websites and charging people for quoting more than 4 words. After several instances have shown the A.P. quotes blogs (without links), the A.P. decided to quote another blog once more for old times sake. They decided to quote TechCrunch, for irony’s sake, in an article about all the brouhaha over their own anti-quoting policy.

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington announced he sent the news wire a DMCA takedown notice and a bill for $12.50, according to the organization’s own pricing chart for quoting 22 words from his post. Arrington describe’s his actions:

Am I being ridiculous? Absolutely. But the point is to illustrate that the A.P. is taking an absurd and indefensible position, too. So I’ve called my lawyers (really) and have asked them to deliver a DMCA takedown demand to the A.P. And I will also be sending them a bill for $12.50 with that letter, which is exactly what the A.P. would have charged me if I published a 22 word quote from one of their articles.

Kudos to Arrington for standing up for bloggers and fair use.

Update 11:48 a.m. - The A.P. released a statement this morning saying the matter between it and the Drudge Retort, the original target of DMCA takedown notices, is closed.  No details about what was actually discussed.  Just move on, nothing to see here.  Let’s see how that works for them.

As part of my now ongoing series picking on the Associated Press, numerous examples of the organizations hypocrisy are coming to a broil.

The Associated Press is demanding bloggers follow guidelines on how to cite A.P. articles, requiring payment if even 5 words are copied. Michelle Malkin offers some magic math to see how much the Associated Press owes her for plagiarizing her blog posts.

Malkin finds A.P. articles from April and May quoting her posts, without providing links back. Malkin also reports the A.P. quoted the blog Patterico on Monday, the same day they were outlining their pay-for-fair-use program.

And both times the A.P. didn’t provide links back (print mentality), unlike us generous bloggers. Both Malkin and Patterico are kind enough to link to the A.P. articles plagiarizing them. I’ll stick with linking to just the blogs.

One theory about the A.P.’s attack on bloggers is it’s posturing against its own customers; newspapers who might realize they don’t need the A.P. anymore. The A.P. was formed to help local papers share reporting resources to cover major, national stories, but on the internet, the A.P. has become competition to these same papers. Suddenly, one user can see the same A.P. story on a dozen websites. Dorian Benkoil writes:

[Cleveland Plain Dealer Editor Susan Goldberg] said she was no longer reliant on The Associated Press for her stories from the region but instead was getting the original versions direct from the other sources around the state rather than paying “a big chunk” of her budget, about $1 million for rewritten AP stories. Picking up directly, on the Web, and putting other papers’ stories directly in the newspaper was also better quality, she said, and readers were noticing:

“I mean, we’ve always had access to news from all over the state. It was just, you know, it went through the AP mill. I frankly think we’re getting better, more distinctively written stories because they’re not going through the AP mill.”

Steve Boriss writes how the A.P.’s stance against linking is a sideways attack to prevent newspapers from just summarizing and linking to A.P. stories instead of paying for them.

Newspaper trying to cut its costs could theoretically drop its AP membership, keep its exclusive content to itself, and start each big story “According to the AP,” lifting as many words as possible then paraphrasing the rest. By cracking down now to limit the number of lifted words, the AP is making the price for defecting members higher.

Basically, the Associated Press, a non-profit organization formed to benefit the United States’ newspapers, is worried about its solvency and longevity (as it should be) and doesn’t want to evolve - it wants to maintain its cushy position of power. Unfortunately, this short term thinking is going to backfire as newspapers and other wire services, like Reuters, pioneer new web-friendly business models leaving the A.P. where it is - obsolete.

Tim Russert, journalist and moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press, died June 13th of a sudden heart attack, first reported on his Wikipedia page at 3:01 p.m. The New York Post had a short announcement half an hour later followed by the first televised announcement by Tom Brokaw on NBC at 3:39 p.m. The IP address of the editor came from Internet Broadcast Systems, an IT company that worked with NBC in the past.

Wikipedia’s scoop raises questions about its legitimacy as a news source. The ability for anybody to edit Wikipedia can and has led to abuses of the online encyclopedia and has hurt its credibility among educators, parents, and people who don’t understand the system. I won’t expect a reporter or user to trust Wikipedia absolutely just like I won’t trust the New York Times or a blog without some kind of citation or corroboration.

Wikipedia’s strength, as evidenced by the Russert edit, is the site can respond quickly to new information The risk is this information isn’t properly vetted, but that’s what the community is for - a community mainstream news organizations don’t have, leading even the most trustworthy sources to post incorrect information and take longer to correct it.

Wikipedia remains an encyclopedia, not a news organization (that’s what Wikinews is for). But can these lines blur?

The Associated Press has released guidelines it expects bloggers and websites to follow when using its content. As I wrote about yesterday, the A.P. sent seven DMCA takedown notices to the Drudge Retort for user-generated headlines and less than 100 word quotes linking to A.P. stories. The A.P. has been helpful enough to offer a tiered system so anybody can license its content, ignoring for the moment the concept of fair use.

• 5-25 words: $12.50
• 26-50 words: $17.50
• 51-100 words: $25.00
• 101-250 words: $50.00
• 251 words and up: $100.00

Non-profits get lower pricing. How generous.

I’m not sure if each number count as a word, so I might owe the A.P. $12.50. Thankfully fair use still exists, no matter how much the A.P. likes to pretend otherwise (and benefit from for all for its articles).

The A.P. provides a helpful form for people to throw money at the not-for-profit organization (A.P. is non-profit, shocking, I know). You must paste the excerpt you wish to plagiarize, no more than 2,000 characters, and provide the URL. The A.P. wants to make sure its content is used wholesomely, so it “reserves the right to terminate this Agreement at any time if Publisher or its agents finds Your use of the licensed Content to be offensive and/or damaging to Publisher’s reputation.”

If the A.P. doesn’t like what you wrote, it can just cancel the agreement. I wonder if they give you your money back?

Last week, the Associated Press sent DMCA takedown notices to the Drudge Retort, a user-submitted news aggregator. Drudge Retort featured seven A.P. articles with headlines (often user-generated, not original), less than 100 word quotes, and a link to the original article which, according to the A.P.’s letter, did not fall under fair use.

The use is not fair use simply because the work copied happened to be a news article and that the use is of the headline and the first few sentences only. This is a misunderstanding of the doctrine of “fair use.” AP considers taking the headline and lede of a story without a proper license to be an infringement of its copyrights, and additionally constitutes “hot news” misappropriation.

The blogosphere spent the weekend lambasting the A.P. for overstepping the bounds of copyrights. The A.P.’s VP and Director of Strategy Jim Kennedy answered with a copy and paste job on dozens of blogs (I wonder who owns those comments):

We get concerned, however, when we feel the use is more reproduction than reference, or when others are encouraged to cut and paste. That’s not good for original content creators; nor is it consistent with the link-based culture of the Internet that bloggers have cultivated so well.

To further remedy the backlash, the A.P. announced today a set of guidelines for bloggers in linking to A.P. articles.

The Associated Press has been reliably archaic in evolving to the internet age. The A.P. pressured Google over its News search engine, eventually convincing Google to pay the A.P. for its stories and pictures. Google had no obligation to pay the A.P. and likely led to other newspapers suing Google for their share and encouraging the A.P. to think it can completely control its content.

Today’s New York Times quoted Kennedy recognizing their initial approach to blogs might have been “heavy-handed.” A.P. executives met to revise their strategy which will likely appear in their usage guidelines. Bloggers, just like mainstream news sources (including the A.P.), won’t accept guidelines on how to use content. The A.P. does not get to set special rules on its content, same as the MLB and ABC and any other organization. The point of fair use is that it doesn’t require permission from the copyright holder. The more companies accept these restrictions, the more other organizations will try to expand the power of their copyrights.

A.P.’s recent moves will inspire bloggers to avoid A.P. stories, instead leading traffic to competitors who want free promotion. The result will be a less influential A.P. as other news services embrace internet technology instead of fight it.