The Challenges facing Print Media: Is Copyright Reform part of the Answer?

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From Hugh Stephens Blog:

This year Canada is required to review and potentially update its copyright legislation. The passage of the Copyright Modernization Bill in 2012 included a statutory five year review. That formal review has not yet begun—it is scheduled to start in late fall—but in the meantime other work that could impact the review of copyright law is taking place. Among these are the cultural policy review that Heritage Minister Melanie Joly has committed to undertake, and a review on media industries, conducted by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage.

. . . .

In Canada, as elsewhere, daily newspapers are dying on the vine. (One blog predicts that most British papers will cease print editions before the end of the 2020s). The Standing Committee reported that the number of daily papers in Canada had dropped from 122 to 102 over the past five years. Employment in the Canadian media sector has dropped by 16,500 jobs since 2008, almost half of them in print. The same phenomenon has taken place in the US, UK and other countries. In the broadcasting sector, while it is still profitable, local news coverage (which for most broadcasters in Canada is a condition of licence) has declined in quality and quantity.

The crux of the problem, widely known, is that the advertising dollars that in the past supported print journalism and linear television broadcasting have migrated rapidly online. But more than just shifting online, the bulk of those revenues have not gone to the content creators, but instead to the content indexers and aggregators, and social media platforms.

. . . .

In the words of Duff Jamison, of the Alberta Weekly Newspapers Association;

“I do think that copyright laws were designed before we had this mass digital distribution of content. They probably need to be reviewed and brought up to date…. We put in a possible suggestion. If you click through to a journalist’s story, then at that point perhaps that journalist and the newspaper that employs him should receive a payment. There are ways to get at this.

The two companies, the two oligarchs really, Facebook and Google, take 75% of the digital revenues in Canada. It’s an enormous amount. That’s money that once underpinned our business model. There needs to be some approach through copyright… Is there some way of enacting that type of regulation, which would allow for a better split between the Googles and the Facebooks and the newspapers that are actually generating that content? A great deal of Internet traffic is going to news sites.”

He was echoed by Bob Cox, Chair of the Canadian Newspaper Association;

We need updated copyright laws to protect original work. Papers invest heavily in original journalism, which is then shared, reused, and rewritten by others, often for commercial gain, because the two-decades-old fair dealing law does not take into account the ease of digital reproduction. If newspapers were compensated for their original content and the investment was protected for longer, it would be a significant boost to our revenues.”

Link to the rest at Hugh Stephens Blog and thanks to Paul for the tip.

15 thoughts on “The Challenges facing Print Media: Is Copyright Reform part of the Answer?”

  1. “… If newspapers were compensated for their original content and the investment was protected for longer, it would be a significant boost to our revenues.”

    Nope, I’d just stop reading the newspaper entirely.

  2. If you click through to a journalist’s story, then at that point perhaps that journalist and the newspaper that employs him should receive a payment. There are ways to get at this.

    Of course there is. Don’t let people read the article without paying. Put up a pay wall so people have to pay to read the article. Nobody is stopping you. Go for it.

  3. No. Copyright reform can not save print (and trad-pub) because that’s not the issue print is facing.

    The issue for print media is that it is no longer required in order for a story to go from the writer to a reader.

  4. Yeah, Canada, that’s the way to protect your content: Build a pay-wall around it. Yeah, that’ll work. Wave bye-bye to another hundred dailies when you do.

    Lessee, you identified the problem: Advertising dollars are leaving print. And your solution to that problem is to make people pay for the article? No newspaper ever survived on subscriptions and print sales alone. Am I the only one who sees a disconnect here?

    I’m gung-ho for copyright reform in theory, but I know in practice any reform in North America will be driven by the Disney lobby, and the mouse is a louse to small guys.

    • They’re going to try that trick of making Google and Bing and the others pay to link – after all, it worked so well over the Germany! 😉

        • In both cases Google took their ball and went home – and the papers cried because their readers stopped bothering to look for them. The German papers found a way around the law, Spain as I recall they blocked that trick. And the EU is trying it now as I recall – proving they’re to dumb to learn from others.

          What they just can’t figure out is that it’s cheaper for Google to stop indexing them than it is to pay them anything at all.

          A bit like H playing games with Amazon, if they pushed too hard Amazon would have been better off returning any unsold books (or dropping them in a bin at a loss) and removing H from their pages than playing their games.

  5. We pay for The Economist. It is chock full of good stuff (though rather depressing). We read it in paper every week.

    Based on the number of words per issue, the value of content for, say, NY Times articles is very low.

    I’d happily pay $X a week if someone then divvied it up by number of words to the various content providers I click on (even though there is a LOT of junk). It is irritating to follow a link and get a tiny chunk of text blocked by a paywall. A Paywall Passport would work for me.

    • a ‘paywall passport’ what a good idea Alicia. Across borders, x number of articles for free then the ones after that for one pass, like Ku, pay for what is read

      interesting

      WHile I get that some newspapers were shills for one thing or another, and some were unapologetically 90 ads 10 news, I would not like investigative reporting ever to go away.

  6. I’m confused about how FB is taking their share. When I see a link in FB and click it, it takes me to the website of that link. The entire article isn’t published on FB, only a summary and link. Or image and link.

    Newsprint is OLD news. Online is much faster BUT the quality has suffered because everyone is in a rush to be the first to publish or air it. All I see is parroting not Investigative Journalism.

    A good newspaper could have a digital version that is supported by one or two ads, but the more ads they put on there, the more people will use ad blockers.

    I used to visit CNN’s webpage for the news. But they kept adding more ads and fake news so I quit. CNN (over two years ago) had more than 200 scripts running in the background. WHY?
    Some if it is tracking scripts and others are ads.
    No thanks.

    • Facebook and Google (and MSN and Yahoo and CNET and all the other “free” online sites) get their money when the page with the link loads. You don’t have to click on an article for them to be paid. You don’t even have to even look at the blurb.

      When you click on the link it sends you to the source home page and if they are smart and have ads on it, they get paid for the click. It doesn’t matter to Facebook and co if the article they link to is paywalled or not, they already got paid.

      Of course, each individual page you visit generates just fractions of a penny but when you have hundreds of millions of surfers loading dozens of pages each day…

      They deal in bulk and they don’t terribly care where the links go. Forbid them to link to Canadian/Spanish/German/Lower elbonian sites? They’ll link to something else. As long as the page is full they don’t care what fills it.

      The funny thing is Canada is all about “cultural” protectionism. (Yeah, right.) Yet here they are floating and idea that will lead to less visibility to Canadian content and more visibility (and ca$h) to foreign concept.

      And it just happens Canadians are more facebook-happy than anybody on the planet.

      http://www.adweek.com/digital/canadians-still-the-most-active-facebook-users-in-the-world/

      So yes, go ahead, mister IdiotPolitician™. Charge for linking. See where it gets you and your paymasters.

      • Here is a nice summary of how online ads generate money on aggregation sites:

        http://www.promisemedia.com/online-advertising/online-rate-card-tips-and-guidelines/amp

        Rates seem to average around $15 per thousand eyeballs.
        With a ten to one link to ad ratio each link represents at most a fifth of a cent per view.

        And since the money comes from *page* views, not news link clicks, there is no way to allocate the revenue to the specific extracts filling the page. After all peopke just skim those sites to see if something catches their eye.

  7. The idea that someone has to pay for linking your article title and a 50 word teaser to your FULL ARTICLE on YOUR OWN SITE, thereby driving traffic to YOU is full-on lunacy. Also, as far as I know, FB isn’t going out and finding these articles and posting them to drive their own traffic. Users are SHARING them on FB, usually at the REQUEST OF THE OWNER OF THE IP (The purpose of the little “Share on FB” button). Or, in many cases, the article is being shared by the IP OWNER THEMSELVES.

    This is just madness.

    • “This is just madness.”

      And nothing they’re planning has anything to do with saving their print side.

      • No, that part isn’t about saving print, its about trying to monetize digital, because printing and distributing the newspaper is a really, really small cost overall. They still retain significant overhead even if they all go digital only. Especially for any in-depth reporting. True journalism can be pretty expensive, so I get the angst. But these platforms that share links to their hosted content are their best friends, and the only reason anybody finds their work.

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