stoweboyd and the /messengers

As old school print media smashes face first into the web, the discordant yowls of the dispossessed journalists seem to be growing louder. Today's case in point is Ian Shapira, who was Gawkered:

[via Ian Shapira -- How Gawker Ripped Off My Newspaper Story ]

[...]

I started thinking about all the labor that went into producing my 1,500-word article. The story wasn't Pulitzer material; it was just a reported look at one person capitalizing on angst in the workplace. With all the pontificating about the future of newspapers both in the media and in Capitol Hill hearings, I began wondering if most readers know exactly what is required to assemble a feature story for a publication such as The Post. Journalism at a major newspaper is different from what's usually required in the wild and riffy world of the Internet. And that wild world is killing real reporting -- the kind of work practiced not just by newspapers but by nonprofits, some blogs and other news outlets.

Gawker's version of my story, headlined " 'Generational Consultant' Holds America's Fakest Job," begins by telling its readers to "Meet Anne Loehr" -- with a link to my story but no direct mention of The Post. It then condenses her biography: "Loehr is 44. She spent the entire decade of the 90s running hotel and safari operations in Kenya." That's information I got after an hour-plus phone call with Loehr and typing out 3,000 words of notes.

The bulk of the posting consists of Loehr's own words, her thoughts on this generation's affinity for reality television and its supposed aversion to Nike products. (Still no mention of The Post.) For those little nuggets, I drove a half-hour to Fairfax County's Tower Club, and attended her two-hour "Get Wise with Gen Ys" session and recorded it.

Then the work got painstaking: It took about four hours to transcribe the session. (Are you playing mournful melodies on your violin yet?)

After the quotations from Loehr, the Gawker posting is a cut-and-paste of my own stuff, a description of why a financial adviser attended (so she can work better with clients who are "trust fund babies," she said). Still no attribution to The Post.

The eighth and last paragraph discusses and links to Loehr's "generational cheat sheet" on our Web site. Finally, beneath the last paragraph, the hyperlinked words "Washington Post" appear in red. Would the average visitor have clicked on the link to read the whole story? I probably wouldn't have.

After all the reporting, it took me about a day to write the 1,500-word piece. How long did it take Gawker to rewrite and republish it, cherry-pick the funniest quotes, sell ads against it and ultimately reap 9,500 (and counting) page views?

And how long did it take me to clip these paragraphs and paste them into my blog? 10 minutes.

Is that the metric that matters here? The minutes that people invest into the work they do in writing stories online? Is it the number of dollars that The Washington Post allocates to Shapira's salary, 401(k), and medical plan? The overhead of the building and editors and administration that an accountant would apply to those minutes or hours or days spent on a story in question?

Or is it the pageviews? The value in the marketplace of eyeballs eyeballing the story (either the Gawker piece or the Shapira piece), and the fungibility of words into ad revenues?

That seems to be the thrust of Shapira's lament: he wrote these precious words at some calculable cost (or expected return) based on many hours of work and Gawker's writer spent only an hour or so.

What has Shapira left out of these seemingly simple economics lesson?

Gawker has a solid web brand, and attracts a lot of traffic based on its snarky post-journalism tone, where Shapira is a writer for the Metro/VA desk for the Washington Post. The post has a solid reputation for its journalism, but Shapira is a young contributor whose biggest claim to fame is -- you guessed it -- this very brouhaha with Gawker.

But most obviously absent is an appreciation that the web -- at least for those of us who are not approaching it as an economic snakepit -- can be a non-zero sum game. The hypothetical value of Shapira's story is not stolen by a Gawker author lifting the main points from the story, but it is increased.

My experience as a web citizen is improved by the network of links being created, the references and cross references, the disagreements and the right-ons. The value of the story -- the notional topic of Shapira's piece and the others that built on his work -- is increased.

But Shipira thinks it is 'his' story because he wrote about it, did the legwork, transcribed the notes. He 'owns' it in some way, and he is being robbed of... something... by the Gawker piece building on his work.

So, at core, the issue here is something larger. Who owns the world of discourse? Who is allowed to profit, and in what way, from the actions of participants in this web sphere?

Various arguments could be made about fanciful mechanisms.

• Imagine a world where people are paid to read stories, basically getting a kickback from publishers from ad revenue. (Hasn't caught on.)
  
  
• We could weigh the value of every link pointing to or away a piece on the web, and a complex, Google-pagerank-ish algorithm could figure out to six decimal points how much everyone owes each other each week. (Impossible to implement, I bet.)
  
  
• Authors could attempt to demand that no one should link to their pieces, or clip any information from them without permission or recompense. (Counter to fair use provisions of copyright and free speech protections.)
  
  
• Companies like the Washington Post can put everything behind a paywall. (Good luck.)

These mechanisms hinge on old thinking about value.

The web is a place where connection trumps content: content isn't king, context in a web of meaning is king.

Companies like the Washington Post will have to evaluate their investments of time and brand based on new economics grounded in connectedness and openness. If the 401(k) plan and editorial overhead is too expensive relative to what can come from this sort of journalism, then the workflow and workplace of journalism will have to change.

We have seen recent clamor that the fall of old school journalism imperils Western civilization, and perhaps governments or non-profits will have to support it if we are to avert falling into the Dark Ages.

This particular passion play seems made to order: a respectable well-regarded but slowly failing metro newspaper is upstaged by a crass and nimble web journal known for its sweatshop work model and irreverence. You couldn't have picked the players better if you tried.

But most of the hand-wringing is completely off point. The real story is not about what is spent to write the stories, or how much ad revenue is derived by who. The really interesting economic shift is the millions of comments and twitterers and blog posts that are dealing with this controversy today, where no one is getting paid, or making money on ads, or getting a quarterly 401(k) statement.

The majority of what is going on, here, on the web, isn't about the media giants, who continue to look at the web like a butcher eyes a side of beef. They are missing the best part, seeing only the trees, and missing the forest. Gawker&Co, for all their failings, are somewhat closer to the ground here, closer to what we are building on the web.