Why GateHouse should settle its suit

In my latest for the Guardian, I attempt to break down the issues in the case of GateHouse Media v. New York Times Co. to their essentials — and urge that the two sides settle their differences lest the future of online journalism be harmed.

The Globe’s new op-ed columnist

I’ve been tied up with family business the past few days, so it didn’t immediately register when — out of the corner of my eye — I saw my friend the Outraged Liberal fulminating over something outrageous he’d spotted in yesterday’s Boston Globe.

I backtracked this morning. Sure enough, the Globe ran an op-ed piece by Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who was responsible for the terrorist killings of 271 people over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. The Globe now presumes that Gaddafi may instruct us on how best to engage with Russia. Unbelievable.

Mr. O.L. writes that “it would be fascinating to know how this piece wound up in the Globe. No offense, but how many other newspapers rejected it? Who is representing Gaddafi? How much is the author being paid?”

In the New Republic, James Kirchick unloads thusly:

[G]iving shrinking editorial real estate to a dictator so that he may offer his thoughts on a subject that doesn’t even remotely effect the national interests of his country is a new low, not just for the general unseemliness of the exercise, but because of the more traditional and unremarkable concerns of journalistic responsibility. If Gaddafi were willing to write a signed op-ed revealing something new about Lockerbie, it would certainly be newsworthy, and the Globe would have obtained a genuine scoop in publishing it. But the thoughts of the Leader and Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya about Russia are not only irrelevant, they also happen to be just plain unoriginal and uninteresting.

If the Globe still had an ombudsman, perhaps he or she could root around and tell us how this happened. Kirchick seems to think it was a deliberate act, but my own view is that you rarely go wrong in attributing such things to more mundane human frailties — laziness, stupidity or, given the time of year, vacations.

In any case, we deserve an explanation. It will be interesting to see if one is forthcoming.

Photo (cc) by Amanda Slater and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Monday morning odds and ends

I don’t plan to do much blogging this week, but I do want to call your attention to a few items:

  • Chuck Tanowitz and Adam Reilly have both written sharp analyses of GateHouse Media’s lawsuit against the New York Times Co. I think Reilly is on the mark with his observation that the Globe, through its Boston.com Your Town sites, is going beyond mere linking and is trying to establish itself as a substitute for GateHouse’s Wicked Local sites, while using GateHouse’s content.
  • Joe Dwinell of the Boston Herald has also weighed in with a good item [link now fixed] on the suit. I do disagree with his characterization of this as “David vs. Goliath.” Both GateHouse and the Times Co. are large, publicly traded media companies that are fighting for their financial lives. Call this Wounded Goliath I vs. Wounded Goliath II.
  • Sean Polay, a top Internet guy for Rupert Murdoch’s Ottaway Newspapers (including the Cape Cod Times and the Standard-Times of New Bedford), says he wouldn’t mind at all if Boston.com linked to Ottaway content. Interesting, given that Herald publisher Pat Purcell recently accepted Murdoch’s offer to run the Ottaway papers.

Finally, a source has provided me with a copy of Barclays’ most recent report on the New York Times Co., the one that placed the value of the Globe at a mind-bogglingly low $20 million. I have posted it (PDF), so you can have a look for yourself. Perhaps a few gimlet-eyed Media Nation readers can find some gold.

I’m dubious. As you will see, Barclays values the Globe at somewhere between $12 million and $20 million — lower than the value of the “Worchester Papers,” which it places at somewhere between $15 million and $25 million. That can’t be right.

And, come on — the “Worchester Papers”? Does someone at Barclays think the Worcester Telegram & Gazette are two different papers?

What happens to the Globe and NESN?

No doubt many folks at the Boston Globe are breathing a sigh of relief at the news that its corporate parent, the New York Times Co., plans to unload its 17.5 percent stake in the Red Sox. The conflicts of interest have been many — not over game stories, but over various Red Sox business ventures the Globe has had to cover over the years.

But hold on. I thought the main reason the Times Co. made this investment was because of the Sox’ 80 percent ownership of New England Sports Network. Globe sportswriters have been all over NESN, and some — especially Bob Ryan — have been quite good.

I imagine NESN would still want Globe people on the air. But doesn’t this mean the end of Globe exclusivity? I suppose NESN and the Globe could sign some sort of agreement, but that’s not the same as ownership.

Among other things, it strikes me that Sean McAdam, formerly of the Providence Journal and now of the Boston Herald, is an accomplished on-air performer, and would fit right in at NESN.

More: Adam Reilly wonders the same thing that I did when I first read the story: Is the Globe really worth just $20 million? I think it’s a typo. This suggests the Globe is worth $120 million. Of course, that’s shocking enough, given that the Times Co. bought the Globe for $1.1 billion back in 1993.

Journalism still legal in Massachusetts

Not that this was going anywhere, but the state’s Civil Service Commission has declined to punish the Eagle-Tribune of North Andover for committing journalism.

Michael Neve filed a complaint against the Tribune after the paper photographed him leaving a hearing at which he testified to having offered a $15,000 bribe to Methuen Mayor William Manzi. (Manzi reportedly did not accept the bribe, and the case is actually about something else.)

Neve’s lawyer had persuaded the commission to bar anyone from taking a photo during and after the hearing, held Oct. 30 in Boston. The Tribune responded by snapping Neve’s picture outside, after he’d left the building. Neve’s lawyer, James Krasnoo, tried to argue that “after” encompassed his client’s perambulations outdoors, in a public place, which is quite a stretch. By that definition, it’s still “after.”

“I think it’s a good result for the paper and I think it’s the right result for the paper’s readers as well,” the Tribune’s lawyer, friend of Media Nation Rob Bertsche, is quoted as saying.

My only quibble: the Tribune should have posted the photo online.

More resources on the GateHouse case

Soon it will be Christmas Eve in Media Nation, so I don’t want to get too bogged down with blogging today. But I do want to call your attention to the excellent work the Citizen Media Center is doing on the matter of GateHouse Media’s lawsuit against the New York Times Co.

First, there is Citizen Media founder Dan Gillmor’s nuanced take. (Is Jeff Jarvis going to call his ally Gillmor “clueless”? It’s time for Mr. Buzz Machine to settle down with a nice cup of decaf and take another look at this.) Next, the Citizen Media Law Project offers an analysis of GateHouse’s legal claims. The center is also aggregating information about the case as it unfolds. Indispensible stuff.

Yesterday U.S. District Court Judge William Young rejected GateHouse’s request for a temporary restraining order, which would have prevented the Times Co.’s Boston.com from linking to GateHouse content immediately. (GateHouse story here; Boston Globe story here.)

A trial date has been set for Jan. 5, which seems pretty aggressive, given that Media Nation hears the Times Co. has been given a deadline of Jan. 6 to respond to GateHouse’s complaint. In all likelihood, the Jan. 5 session will just be a chance for everyone to exchange business cards and New Year’s greetings before getting down to work.

So the Yankees get Teixeira, too

I’m not going to panic, but it would be nice if the Yankees didn’t sign every free agent on the market — especially Mark Teixeira, the one guy the Red Sox really wanted.

What this comes down to is Teixeira versus Mike Lowell. Teixeira will be more productive than Lowell even if Lowell is completely healthy. More important, Teixeira is just entering what should be his prime years, whereas Lowell’s best seasons are probably behind him.

One good thing to come out of this is that Kevin Youkilis stays at first base. Youk is a terrific first baseman, and he plays with such maniacal intensity that, if he moved to third permanently, he might burn himself out.

Another good thing? Everybody hates the Yankees again.

How the GateHouse suit looks from both sides

I don’t want to prejudge the lawsuit GateHouse Media filed against the New York Times Co., which owns the Boston Globe and Boston.com, except to say it’s a fascinating case that will be watched closely by everyone in the news business.

There’s a lot that cuts both ways. Here’s how I think it looks from the Times Co.’s point of view.

By putting together a series of Boston.com Your Town sites that link to content in the Boston Globe, independent blogs and other newspapers, including GateHouse papers, the Times Co. is doing exactly what new-media experts are advocating. Currently there are three, in Newton, Needham and Waltham. But Boston.com’s Bob Kempf has said the goal is to roll out 120 Your Town sites throughout Eastern Massachusetts.

Rather than treating your news site like a walled community, the idea is to offer intelligent aggregation, linking not just to your own content but to that of other news organizations as well. An example of a mainstream news organization doing this is the Washington Post with its Political Browser, which offers a roundup of what its editors believe is the best political coverage online, regardless of whether it resides on the Post’s servers.

Act as a trusted guide, so this thinking goes, and readers will reward you by coming back, even though you keep sending them to other sites. And as for the news organizations to which you’re linking, it’s a win-win for them, since they’re receiving more traffic than they otherwise would.

Then there’s how this looks if you’re, say, Kirk Davis, the president of GateHouse Media New England.

From Davis’ point of view, what Your Town is doing is not offering intelligent aggregation; it’s simply scraping headlines and ledes off GateHouse’s Wicked Local sites and presenting them as Boston.com’s own news.

Even if Your Town drives traffic to individual GateHouse stories, it is destroying the value of the Wicked Local home pages — including those in Newton, Needham and Waltham. There are GateHouse papers in some 125 communities in Eastern Massachusetts, and the prospect is that Your Town and Wicked Local will be going head to head in each one.

Yes, Boston.com gives credit to the GateHouse papers, and yes, you have to click through to read the stories. But in many cases you don’t have to read the stories to get the gist of it. This is not a novel proposition — earlier this year, the Associated Press went after bloggers for reproducing its headlines and ledes, arguing that represented most of the value of its news stories.

By offering what copyright lawyers refer to as the “substantiality” — that is, the best and most marketable part — of GateHouse’s stories, Boston.com, GateHouse charges, is not complying with the notion of “fair use,” which defines the circumstances under which a copyright-holder’s work can be re-used without permission.

And, of course, both the Times Co. and GateHouse are trying to sell advertising. I’ve seen several observers attempt to draw parallels to Google News. But you will not find any ads on Google News. That doesn’t necessarily solve the fair-use problem; to oversimplify, the test is whether the copyright-holder is being hurt, not whether those re-using the content are making money. But it does make a difference. (And it definitely makes a difference with GateHouse, since it publishes its content under a non-commercial Creative Commons license.)

In this case, both the Your Town and Wicked Local sites feature local advertising, which, ultimately, is what this dispute is all about.

Here’s a round-up of some of the latest developments.

  • The Recovering Journalist, Mark Potts, has no sympathy for GateHouse’s position, and speculates that “a dinosaur or two in GateHouse management” are behind the lawsuit. Potts is entitled to his opinion, but his speculation is wrong — it’s not the dinosaurs. Or at least it’s not just the dinosaurs.
  • I’m quoted in accounts this morning by Russell Contreras of the Associated Press (formerly of the Globe) and Christine McConville of the Boston Herald.
  • More coverage by GateHouse News Service reporter Neal Simpson and by David Kaplan of PaidContent.org.
  • Jeff Jarvis jerks his knee in such a predictable manner that he risks dislocation.
  • At Boston Daily, Paul Flannery offers some smart thoughts.
  • Yesterday I posted GateHouse’s complaint (PDF). This morning I’ve added an affidavit (PDF) filed by Greg Reibman, editor-in-chief of GateHouse’s papers in Greater Boston. I look forward to posting the Times Co.’s response as well.