The Columbia Journalism Review has a great example of the way old media sometimes fails to adjust to new media. The Columbia Dispatch is the paper that broke the story about Ted Williams, the then-homeless man who is now a sports announcer.
A reader, who credited the Dispatch, took the video of Williams from the paper's website and posted it on YouTube. It went viral, but the paper objected and had the video taken down because it violated copyright laws. But as Laurie Kirchner at CJR points out, what's left after a Google search is a disabled video, the uploaded video from Russia Today and, way down if you look for it, the video uploaded by the Dispatch.
As CJR notes, this is a case in which the rules -- copyright rules that the Dispatch is working to enforce -- overshadow the point of the rules -- that the Dispatch gets credit for its hard work.
I am certainly not advocating that news sites should “give it all away for free.” I've written previously about how paywalls are appropriate and necessary in many circumstances, and, likewise, I don't think news sites should ever tolerate the kind of copy-paste text-theft that is unfortunately on the rise.
But. Sometimes, sometimes, news sites would do well to acknowledge the reality of both legal and illegal content-sharing online, especially of video—and rather than rejecting it, learn to use it to their benefit. Short, eye- (or ear-) catching, “viral” video is just such an occasion.
The inability of those who run newspapers the old-fashioned way to understand which waves are worth riding is what's killing old media. There's no way to make those at the top of established, slow-moving institutions more fluent in a completely new medium, and that's what's required for them to fight for their rights more effectively in that new medium.
But the other point is this: The story of Williams, about which everyone has heard now, started because of old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting that newspapers still support better than any other institution. It's worth remembering every time that a story like this comes out, that while the Internet is killing traditional news-gathering outlets, it's those outlets that have helped feed the Internet.
-- Monica Potts
