Not all news aggregation is good, or fair to those who did the work
It won’t surprise long-time readers to see this, but I am not completely supportive of all link aggregation sites. It depends on how the site collects the links and presents them. This makes me a minority, if not a bit of a heretic, among those who advocate online news and are critical of the business practices of the print media.
On one hand, there are search like Google and Yahoo that use ‘bots that crawl though almost all Websites, decides what the links are about, then will serve up a list of results based the words used in a search.
This is cool. News organizations that receive hits from these sites ought to be thankful for the potential revenue generation page views.
And there there are cases like this:
The Associated Press has defeated a news aggregation site it sued under a 91-year-old legal theory that does not rest on copyright ownership.
In a settlement announced Monday, the world’s oldest and largest newsgathering operation forced All Headline News to discontinue its practice of rewriting AP stories and posting them to the AHN site with a new byline and no credit. The site, which sells news to the media, dubs itself as “The Missing Piece to Your News and Content Puzzle.”
The AP’s suit against All Headline News of Florida rested in part on the so-called “hot news” doctrine. A federal judge in the New York lawsuit had ruled in February that AP properly asserted the doctrine, first recognized by the Supreme Court in 1918. While facts can not be copyrighted, under the hot news doctrine news outlets can sue a rival for re-reporting “time sensitive, ‘hot news.’”
Basically, these clowns were taking the someone else’s work and passing it off as their own.
It’s even more egregious than what the New York Times was doing with material from GateHouse. I was opposed to that at the time, even though a lot of deep thinkers like Jake Jarvis thought it was just spiffy since news out to be free.
I found this Wired link on FARK and naturally it’s tagged “scary” which it, in really, is not. And it’s not difficult to understand why. Google and Yahoo aren’t claiming someone else’s work is theirs.
UPDATE: I was mistaken on Jay Rosen’s position on the NYT/GateHouse dispute. My apologies.
Billy Dennis is a former reporter and editor at small daily and weekly newspapers in Illinois and Missouri. He comments on media, news and politics. He also owns and operates 
