Excerpting

NY Times:

When the popular New York business blog Silicon Alley Insider quoted a quarter of Peggy Noonan’s Wall Street Journal column in mid-February, the editor added a caveat at the end: “We thank Dow Jones in advance for allowing us to bring it to you.”

The editor added “in advance” because Dow Jones, the publisher of The Journal, had not given the blog permission to use the column. The excerpt was published with the assumption that it would be permitted under the “fair use” statute of copyright law.

Generally, the excerpts have been considered legal, and for years they have been welcomed by major media companies, which were happy to receive links and pass-along traffic from the swarm of Web sites that regurgitate their news and information.

But some media executives are growing concerned that the increasingly popular curators of the Web that are taking large pieces of the original work — a practice sometimes called scraping — are shaving away potential readers and profiting from the content.

With the Web’s advertising engine stalling just as newspapers are under pressure, some publishers are second-guessing their liberal attitude toward free content.

“A lot of news organizations are saying, ‘We’re not willing to accept the tiny fraction of a penny that we get from the page views that these links are sending in,’ ” said Joshua Benton, the director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard. “They think they need to defend their turf more aggressively.”

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The sites that attempt to restrict excerpting will not gain additional readership from that effort. Sites like this one highlight stories and commentary of interest to a certain group of readers who do not have the same time to scan the web to find these stories. If they find a post interesting they click through to the original.

There is also some synergy when the news sites link post that are from different publishers allowing their readers to see different content. There are some news sites that reproduce entire posts from PrairiePundit under an agreement with a blog syndication.

I think if I were limited to just a link and my commentary there would be less click through to the original. But the idea that Google News, by running a headline and the first paragraph of a story is violating the fair use doctrine is just absurd. I view it as another resource to find stories that interest me and my readers. It is one of between 75 and 100 sites I look at daily to find things of interest.

Turning every blogger into something like the Drudge Report would add drudgery to special interest readers.

As it i, I already avoid the AP finding better stories elsewhere for links or just ignore the story altogether. The same applies to some syndicated material. I think they are the lessor because they are not getting the attention for their product. I think a fair analogy is free trade principals. The Smoot-Hawleys in the news business will make themselves poorer for their efforts.