Which model is better? The old media dinosaurs that Cory Doctorow mocks or the new slick Web *.0 blogs? As I've spent most of my working life as both a freelancer for the media dinosaurs and a programmer churning out code for open and closed source companies, I want to take a minute to defend the honor of these so-called dinosaurs.
- Dinosaurs pay photographers -- Not very much, but they do. How much of the ad revenue does BoingBoing pay to photographers? I wouldn't be surprised to hear that it's zero percent. How much do they pay themselves? Is that "fair use"?
I had the chance to have Dith Pran take a picture of John Draper a.k.a. Captain Crunch for an article. The back of my mind kept pulling up images from the movie "The Killing Fields". I realize that it's theoretically possible for bloggers in Iraq to post local pictures, but where are they? Does BoingBoing link to many? It's one thing for Twitter users to write about a plane going down in the Hudson river in full view of millions of apartment windows. It's another to send someone into war time. Most assignments aren't so dangerous, but it's still nice to pay the people who contribute.
- Dinosaurs Have Unions -- The dinosaur media companies may hate the unions. They may blame the unions for their troubles. But they still work with them. How many people are unionized at BoingBoing? Is making everyone a "manager" really much different from the piece work that helped the drive for unionization? I'm not sure about unions myself, but I think it's a bit odd to voice such strong support for leftist causes and then use words like "dinosaur" to apply to companies that still try to pay a living wage?
- Dinosaurs give credit -- There's something ironic in the way that this post about a plan to fund the news comes with a nice Flickr photo published under a Creative Commons license that requires attribution. Where's the attribution? Sometimes BoingBoing credits the photographer or illustrator and sometimes they don't. While I think that dinosaur media rarely do a great job of paying people or giving everyone fair credit, I think they're certainly a step above this random practice.
- Dinosaurs pay taxes -- The old media filed corporate income taxes. While I'm sure they use the same loopholes as every other corporation, they still paid more in taxes than non-profits like the EFF or USC. While I love most non-profits and celebrate their missions, society won't function if everything turns into a non-profit. Everyone will be sitting around filing policy papers on what the government should do but no one will actually be paying the taxes that keep the government running.
- Dinosaurs don't rely heavily on BlockQuotes -- Dinosaur media organizations do borrow and they frequently ride on each other's coat tails, but I don't know many that take it to the extremes as some bloggers. While I love BoingBoing, I'm not sure that stories like this , this , or this do much for anyone. The meat of the story is between the blockquote tags and there's not much of anything original here at all, even in the wrapper text outside the tags.
I do believe that bloggers drive traffic but I wonder whether heavy use of blockquotes helps or hurts. If the blog does a good job finding the paragraphs with the meat of the story, I'm guessing most people won't click through. At some point, it's just not fair. What's that point? I don't know. But if a blog has 80% of its material between blockquote tags and only 1% of the people are clicking through on a story, then they're keeping the bulk of the ad revenues from that 80%.
- Dinosaurs are fair -- It's common for news organizations to rely heavily on the reporting of others, but editors usually insist that a reporter must "advance the story." That is, there's got to be something new. When a blogger grabs the heart of a good story and wraps a thin sentence or two around it, that's not advancing the story.
Many people seem to forget that "fair" is a two-way street. Sure, it's fair to complain about copyright owners that insist on outrageous fees for a few seconds of footage. But it's also fair for the content creators to complain about bloggers who hide behind fair use doctrine when they just reprint the heart of a story.