The Internet, as someone once said, is merely a collection of back links. I’m not sure who said that—I’m actually sure several people have said something along those lines—but whoever said it first should probably get credit, and the way to credit an original thought online is with a hyperlink.

Throughout the day on Boston Daily we point to other people’s work and then try to come up with some kind of analysis or maybe just a pithy bit of snark. That’s blogging and it’s become an acceptable line of journalistic work, albeit one without crystal clear ethical and legal boundaries.

Gatehouse Media is not suing the New York Times Company about blogging, per se, but a potential consequence of the suit is that the unwritten laws of the online jungle may be more clearly drawn.

The job of the journalist has always been to get the story. The job of a columnist is to provoke thought. The job of a blogger is to do both. Get the story, usually but not always from some other source, and provoke thought, or anger or whatever keeps the page views up and the comments flowing.

The theory, and it’s only a theory, is that by adding the appropriate hyperlink and using context vis-a-vis pull quotes or straight text quotes from the original source the blogger gets fresh material and the source gets a new stream of traffic from people who might not have otherwise seen it. It’s win-win. In theory.

Sometimes the blogger goes too far and his/her material isn’t so fresh, such as this example where The Chicago Reader accused the Huffington Post of “straight stealing” their Bon Iver review.

At the heart of Gatehouse Media’ suit is boston.com’s Your Town sites that aggregate content from various local sources, particularly Gatehouse’s Wicked Local sites. In the complaint, which I saw on Dan Kennedy’s site, Gatehouse claims that:

Defendant is reproducing, displaying and distributing on the infringing Website unauthorized verbatim copies of newspaper article headlines and the first sentence thereof (“the ledes”) as first published by the plaintiff in their Newspapers or corresponding online editions…

Defendant is offering plaintiff’s copyrighted material on the infringing Website without plaintiff’s express or implied permission, in violation of United States copyright and trademark laws.

This gets to “fair use” and Gatehouse is attempting to draw lines. What is too much? A blurb, a lead, 200 words, 250 words? That has spooked, among others, Universal Hub’s Adam Gaffin who is just about the fairest of the users out there. Gaffin wrote yesterday:

Whoa. 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.

The traditional journalist doesn’t worry about page views or circulation numbers in practice. That’s not their job and successful news-gathering organizations earn their trust by not only getting it right as often as they can, but also by keeping the business concerns out of view from the working journalist.

That’s not the way it works online. The blogger has to also be a part-time PR person for his/her work, hustling out the latest to bigger organizations with bigger traffic numbers in an effort to gather more clicks and justify their existence. But along with the hustle is the expectation that the bigger source won’t rip you off. But that’s all it is, an expectation.

I receive tips from Wicked Local editors. Sometimes I use them, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I find material on Wicked Local sites that I think is interesting to Boston Daily and I build a post around it.

We sell ads on bostonmagazine.com and thus are a for-profit site, but I’m going to continue using material from Wicked Local sites based on the language about “express or implied permission.” Express permission being a straight news tip from an editor, implied being the fact that I receive tips in the first place.

As far as I know blogging is not what Gatehouse’s suit is all about, but there are more than enough gray areas built into the complaint that, as Kennedy said, “This is going to be fascinating to watch.”

RELATED

Kennedy, of course, is all over it [Media Nation]

The comments on Gaffin’s post are worth perusing [Universal Hub]

The Newton Tab’s story [Wicked Local]

The Globe’s [boston.com]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008 at 12:19 pm and is filed under Globe, Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted by Paul Flannery on 12/23/08 in Globe, Internet 2 Comments »