I know — let’s keep the news secret!
When I came across an opinion piece at SFGate about how to help newspapers survive the tide of online media (hat tip to Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine), I thought at first that it was a kind of Onion-style satire, or a “modest proposal” a la Jonathan Swift’s famous baby-eating essay.
Unfortunately, Peter Scheer — who describes himself as a journalist and lawyer who runs a free-speech advocacy group in California — doesn’t seem to be kidding. He actually believes that newspapers and wire services should keep the news to themselves (and to paying subscribers) for 24 hours so as to suck the life out of those no-good aggregators like Google News and Yahoo News:
Newspapers and wire services need to figure out a way, without running afoul of antitrust laws, to agree to embargo their news content from the free Internet for a brief period — say, 24 hours — after it is made available to paying customers.
This is the most mind-bogglingly daft idea I have come across in a long while. Jeff Jarvis calls it “numbnutty,” and former journalist Mark Potts calls it the dumbest idea he has seen in a long time. Like me, Steve Fox at NewAssignment had to read it twice to make sure he read it right.
This is stupid from virtually every possible angle. For one thing, newspapers and wire services would never agree to Scheer’s idea — in part because it is clearly anti-competitive in the worst way, as he acknowledges, and also because all it would take is for one newspaper to break the embargo and the whole plan would quickly become irrelevant.
And what about radio and TV? If Scheer thinks that newspapers are loaded with proprietary news that isn’t all over the TV long before the paper hits the doorstep, he is dreaming in Technicolour. Hopefully, his idea would be laughed out of the room should anyone at a real media operation be foolish enough to suggest it.
Update:
My friend Rob Hyndman notes that the Freakonomics guys — who I have a lot of respect for — seem to like the idea. As most of the commenters on their post note, however, it is sure to be completely unworkable. In some cases, newspapers can successfully segregate and embargo some of their original reporting and commentary and analysis (as the Globe does), but trying to keep “the news” secret for 24 hours is an impossibility.
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(On Nov 13th, 2006 at 1:53 pm)
[…] Mathew Ingram: I know — let’s keep the news secret! I won’t join the assault on Peter Scheer’s wacky idea to keep news secret to protect newspapers — Mathew Ingram has already rounded up all the relevant abuse. (tags: newspapers internet advertising journalism) […]