Tag: new media

GateHouse complaint now available

Here is the complaint (PDF) that GateHouse Media has filed against the New York Times Co. in U.S. District Court. Nothing startling; more of a fleshing-out of what we already know.

One thing I find interesting is that GateHouse accuses the Times Co. of trademark infringement. The argument is that readers of Boston.com’s “Your Town” pages might not realize that links to GateHouse papers such as the Newton Tab and the Needham Times actually have nothing to do with Boston.com.

The lawsuit, filed on GateHouse’s behalf by the Boston firm of Hiscock & Barclay, charges the Times Co. with copyright infringment; unfair competition and “false designation of origin”; false advertising (allegedly by touting “Your Town” as comprising original content); trademark dilution; trademark infringement; unfair business practices; and breach of contract, pertaining to the Creative Commons license under which GateHouse makes its content available to noncommercial Web sites.

Universal Hub won’t link to GateHouse

Adam Gaffin, co-founder and editor of the indispensable Universal Hub, writes:

I make money from ads on pages with links to GateHouse articles, so effective immediately, I won’t be linking to any more articles on GateHouse sites. It’s a shame, GateHouse papers do some good work and they seemed to understand how the Web is built, but the last thing I need is to defend myself from a lawsuit over hyperlinks.

The lawsuit is barely a few hours old, and already there’s collateral damage.

GateHouse sues over “Your Town” sites

GateHouse Media will file a lawsuit against the New York Times Co. in U.S. District Court, claiming that links to GateHouse content on Boston.com’s “Your Town” sites constitute copyright infringement, according to an e-mail sent out internally by Kirk Davis, president of GateHouse Media New England.

The case could settle some legal questions about how much one news organization can use of another news org’s content. The Boston.com sites — currently in Newton, Needham and Waltham — take just a line or a brief summary from GateHouse papers such as the Newton Tab, the Needham Times and the Daily News Tribune of Waltham. (“Your Town” also links to local blogs and other news sites.) Boston.com’s Bob Kempf, himself a former GateHouse official, has said the goal is to roll out “Your Town” in 120 cities and towns.

Since Boston.com is selling advertising on its “Your Town” pages, the argument is that the New York Times Co., which owns Boston.com, is profiting from GateHouse’s journalism. And even if Boston.com is driving traffic to individual GateHouse stories, there’s an argument to be made that “Your Town” is diminishing the value of GateHouse’s “Wicked Local” home pages in those communities.

The full text of Davis’ e-mail is as follows:

To Staff:

As many of you know, there has been considerable discussion within our organization about developments surrounding our local web sites, particularly Newton, as we have followed The Boston Globe’s announced plans for community web sites and how they have executed their strategy.

After being unable to resolve the matter informally, GateHouse has commenced legal action in federal district court in Boston today against the New York Times Company in order to prevent the continuing infringement by Boston.com of GateHouse’s valuable intellectual property, created through the effort, experience and expertise of GateHouse personnel. GateHouse has taken this step to enforce its rights under the law and protect the integrity of its trademarks and original news content, in furtherance of its ability to provide hyperlocal news coverage to its newspaper readers and website viewers in the communities throughout the greater Boston region which it has served over many years.

As a matter of policy, I won’t be commenting further on this matter. Instead, it is appropriate that we let this matter take its natural legal course. Simply put, I hope you derive from this development that we value greatly your efforts, commitment and talent.

When appropriate I will update you further on this matter.

I sincerely hope you enjoy the holidays. It’s unfortunate that the economic backdrop is so unsettling, but we’ll work through it. As I have shared with you many times, we occupy an important niche in the media mix. Local news and relationships are our strength and we will safeguard both.

On behalf of the senior management team, we deeply appreciate your commitment!

Sincerely,

Kirk Davis
President
GateHouse Media New England

This is one of the most important stories in the newspaper business right now. It will be fascinating to see how it plays out.

Boston.com unveils Needham site

Boston.com’s hyperlocal site for Needham has debuted. And there are a ton of links to GateHouse’s Needham Times as well as the Hometown Weekly — but not much Boston Globe content. “Wicked Evil Needham” is how a GateHouse source describes it, a play on GateHouse’s “Wicked Local” sites.

Which brings me back to the video I linked to yesterday, in which Boston.com’s Bob Kempf talks about eventually offering 120 hyperlocal sites. I’m kind of scratching my head over that. In a community where Boston.com can put together a page featuring a decent amount of Globe content and links to local, independent bloggers, a few links to other papers’ Web sites strike me as fine. That’s why I think the Newton site is promising.

But what do Kempf and company plan to do in a community like, say, Danvers, worldwide headquarters for Media Nation? We have two papers covering our town: GateHouse’s Danvers Herald and CNHI’s Salem News. Both do quite a nice job. But there are no local bloggers in Danvers whom I’m aware of. And it’s not very often that Globe North does a Danvers-specific story.

Would Boston.com really put together a hyperlocal page consisting of almost nothing but links to the Danvers Herald and the Salem News?

I realize I’m being ridiculously speculative. So let’s wait and see.

Update: Waltham is up, too (via Elana Zak).

120 Boston.com hyperlocal sites?

Someone just called this to my attention. It’s a three-minute promotional video made by the Boston Globe to promote its Boston.com Newton hyperlocal site. In it, you will see Boston.com’s Bob Kempf explain that the plan is eventually to expand the Newton idea to 120 cities and towns.

When it comes to news you can use, though, it looks like Boston.com still has some bugs to work out. (Via Adam Reilly.)

Setting the record straight

My friend Adam Reilly of the Boston Phoenix is having a reading-comprehension problem today.

I have never remotely suggested, as Adam seems to think, that it doesn’t matter how much content the Boston Globe takes from GateHouse’s Newton Tab on its hyperlocal page for Newton. Nor have I said that it’s all right if the majority of Boston.com Newton‘s links come from the Tab.

What I have said is that GateHouse has little to complain about as long as the Globe is taking so little that you have to click through to the Tab’s Wicked Local Newton page in order to get the gist of the story. Which is what the Globe has been doing.

I also agree with Adam that the Globe is going to look silly if its Newton page doesn’t feature a good mix of Globe content, local bloggers and, yes, some links to the Tab.

Although I’m not privy to the details, I do know that Globe and GateHouse executives have been wrangling behind the scenes. For about a week, there was no Tab content at all at Boston.com Newton. Now there is again.

I don’t pretend to know exactly what the right mix is, but it does strike me that Globe editors tried to go about this the right way — and that the folks at GateHouse have, nevertheless, been appropriately prickly about the Globe using their content to boost its own local coverage.

Northeastern students on NewsTrust

Click on photo for Flickr slideshow

Earlier this week, I said I would post on my students’ experience in using NewsTrust, a social-networking tool that lets you share and rate news stories on qualities such as accuracy, sourcing and bias.

Well, I did — but not here. My oversight. Instead, I posted a roundup on the class Web site. And here, in a bit of post-post-modernism, is what NewsTrust had to say about what my students had to say.

Jeff Jarvis and the future of media

I took a pass on the recent dust-up between Slate columnist Ron Rosenbaum and new-media advocate Jeff Jarvis. Jarvis can drive me up a wall, and I thought Rosenbaum made some good points about Jarvis’ Web triumphalism. At the same time, Jarvis is a valuable source of ideas, and, frankly, I have no interest in pissing him off.

But I can’t recommend strongly enough a long profile of Jarvis that appears in the current New York Observer. Written by the Observer’s media columnist, John Koblin, the piece is deep as well as sympathetic to Jarvis’ point of view — yet Jarvis’ critics have their say, too.

If you are looking for a good overview on the state of the news business — and especially the struggling newspaper business — then you need to read Koblin’s article.

And by the way, I can’t help but observe, Jarvis-style, that Koblin’s article would be better still if he and his editors had made the extra effort to link to what he was writing about.

A NewsTrust news hunt on the global economy

Following a presentation on NewsTrust by editor and frequent reviewer Mike LaBonte, my students in Reinventing the News have been finding, submitting and analyzing stories on the global economy. NewsTrust is a social-networking tool aimed at identifying and promoting quality journalism.

I asked each of my students to submit, rate and write a short critique of three different stories on the global economy — part of a “news hunt” that NewsTrust is conducting this week. I thought I’d do the assignment, too, so here are my choices.

The first, from the Christian Science Monitor, is something of a disappointment: an article about pressures on the International Monetary Fund that is so bureaucratic and top-down in its orientation that it’s impossible to understand the effect of those pressures on ordinary people. Even if you grant that we shouldn’t expect much from a brief overview, it’s hard to know what we are supposed to take away from this story.

Moving right along, we come to a roundup in the Guardian on how plummeting oil prices are affecting four major oil-producing states — Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. As with the Monitor story, there is a top-down quality to this that leaves me a little cold. Nevertheless, it is well-executed, and provides some interesting insights into the changing fortunes of regimes that were riding high just a few months ago.

Finally, CNN offers a story on world hunger that, like the Monitor and the Guardian, is too short to get much beyond the superficial but which, unlike the Monitor and the Guardian, grabs us with the riveting, heartbreaking testimony of an aid worker who frequently travels to Haiti.

“It’s horrible. They have to choose among their children,” Patricia Wolff tells CNN. “They try to keep them alive by feeding them, but sometimes they make the decision that this one has to go.” The story demonstrates a key point about good journalism: even a brief report about global developments can be conveyed in human terms.

NewsTrust, which I’ve been following since its founding a couple of years ago (disclosure: I’m a volunteer editor), is one of the more interesting experiments in building a community around the news. If you haven’t checked it out before, you should give it a look.

I’ll post on what my students have been up to later this week.