By Leo Valiquette
As a journalist and newspaper and magazine editor (and I still serve in these capacities from time to time), I’ve written my fair share of headlines. Thousands of them, in fact. But I would never have thought to label such creations, no matter how long I spent trying to come up with something catchy and engaging that would break nicely over two decks, as a “separate literary work.”
But that is exactly what has occurred in Britain in the latest ruling to come out of a legal battle between the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA), which is owned by the U.K.’s eight largest newspaper groups, and Meltwater News.
Meltwater is a media monitoring, news aggregator and clipping service that we subscribe to at inmedia. It is one of many such services available that constantly scour the web for mentions of our clients or of subject matter in which they have an interest. While such services are not 100 per cent effective, they are much more comprehensive and feature-rich than free monitoring services such as Google Alerts.
As a Meltwater client, we of course pay a subscription fee for regular reports on media coverage of our clients and their respective industries. It is this fee-for-service model that has raised the hackles of the NLA and led to the current dispute. A U.K. court has agreed with the NLA’s assertion that the act of copying an article’s headline and a short extraction of the text, and submitting this in the form of a report to a Meltwater client is a form of copying that infringes copyright. The most damning part of this judgment is that an article’s headline has been deemed a “separate literary work” on the basis of the time and creative effort that often goes into crafting it.
The NLA therefore expects Meltwater and its kind to pay licensing fees to copy headlines and submit them as part of a report to its clients. This is not in dispute. Most services already pay licensing fees to the NLA. The issue is that the NLA also wants the clients of Meltwater and similar services to pay additional licensing fees for receiving and viewing a media monitoring report.
It should be noted that the NLA’s claims do not apply to free services such as Google Alerts, but only to the Meltwaters of the world that charge money for their services.
In an article published by the New Statesmen, David Pugh, managing director of the NLA, welcomed the ruling.
“We hope this ruling will help ensure a fair share of web monitoring revenue for publishers and a fair media monitoring market,” he said. “Creating news content for the web is a substantial investment for publishers – it is therefore only right that they take a share when others are profiting from it.”
For Meltwater CEO Jorn Lyseggen, however, this sets a dangerous precedent that undermines the basic principles of the operation and use of the Internet. In theory, it means that users of the Internet must obtain a license from the NLA to view copyrighted material, even if that copyrighted material can be viewed freely on a newspaper’s website without having to pay a subscription. The other irritant is the amount of the licensing fee that the NLA wants to charge to end users, relative to the small amount of material included in a Meltwater report.
“We will appeal this verdict, we think this verdict is a misinterpretation of copyright law,” Lyseggen told the New Statesman. “If this ruling stands it will be a significant step back for the U.K. Internet ecosystem. … If the court upholds this decision then we think the courts need to take a closer look at copyright law and see if it needs to be more up-to-date for today’s world.”
Who is right and who is wrong here?
This isn’t the first incident of “Big Newspaper vs. The News Aggregator.” Earlier this year, Rupert Murdoch’s News International blocked web aggregation service NewsNow from linking to stories on Times Online on the grounds that such services make money from journalism without contributing anything in return.
However, as the New Statesman’s Jason Stampers observed in his story on the subject, “newspapers don’t have to pay anything to brand owners when they write about them, of course. Which means Nike may have to pay to see where its name is used in newspapers, while newspapers can use Nike’s brand for free to help drive readers, web traffic and hence advertising revenues.”
Take it from the guy who has written his share of headlines and edited other journalists’ work to achieve maximum reader eyeball traction – the creative process of not only writing an enticing headline but also crafting the top paragraphs of a story to suck the reader in, is an unapologetically exploitative process. Newspapers try to profit from what could be someone else’s “copyrighted” material all the time, without paying any licensing fee or even obtaining permission. If there is a big name involved in a particular story, we are going to take advantage of that in any way we can if we think it will increase the story’s appeal.
And let’s look at this through the PR lens, since PR shops are the common end-users of Meltwater’s service faced with the prospect of paying these new licensing fees. I challenge anyone who would claim that there is any less creative effort involved to develop a strong headline and lead paragraph for a news release than for a news article. Does that mean that a designation of “separate literary work” and a licensing fee should also apply here?
Let’s not hold to any illusion that Meltwater is anything but a for-profit business trying to achieve a healthy margin with a fee structure of its own. But what is the NLA’s true motivation here at a time when traditional daily media continues to struggle to remain relevant in the age of social media and citizen journalism? And what of the overworked journalists who create all this content in this first place? Somehow I doubt that any additional licensing revenue charged by their corporate overlords will find its way to their pockets.
An online presence opens up a far larger advertising and reader base for a newspaper than was ever possible through print alone, without the costly overhead of newsprint and ink. No matter how much the world has changed, one fundamental thing remains the same — newspapers still need strong circulation numbers and click-through rates with which to impress potential advertisers.
So one would think that it behooves the industry to make it as easy as possible to drive more eyeballs to a newspaper’s website. And yet, newspapers by the score have put up paywalls around their content that require readers to pay a subscription for access in an effort boost flagging revenues. And if the NLA has its way, it will set a precedent where readers can be charged to be linked to content they may not otherwise been aware of, even if that content is available for free on a newspaper’s website.
The dispute between the NLA and Meltwater is the latest example of how newspapers are desperate to find new ways to monetize online content. The question, however, is whether or not they will ultimately end up stabbing themselves in the foot.
By Alexandra Reid
The challenge of incorporating exciting new-media and social-media channels into traditional PR practices has been the subject of a great deal of debate in the PR industry and the source of a lot of consternation among clients. It has left a lot of people lost, confused and scrambling. For many, it’s as if this new technology crept up and pounced on them in the middle of the night. If you’re feeling perplexed as you try to figure out just how new media should be strategically deployed for business, rest assured that you’ve now got support
inmedia recently hired me as its community manager specifically to help clients incorporate new media activities into their broader PR and marketing strategies.
Many businesses wonder why, despite all their efforts in new media, they still haven’t managed to turn followers and connections into customers. Many have also experienced those horrifying moments where harmful conversations develop about their brand while they don’t have any strategy in place to douse the flames.
That’s why it’s imperative that businesses have a well-thought-out plan before starting any new media endeavour.
As a PR agency with the capabilities of a new media agency, that’s where we can help.
inmedia has been modelling best practices in new media for more than a decade and we have the expertise to prepare and execute new media strategies. Not only can we develop strategies for our clients, we can also implement these strategies on behalf of clients.
We found the transition to new media to be rather easy because we didn’t have to alter our existing practices. Let me explain this point because it is exactly this transition that bedevils many PR agencies.
PR has always been about managing relations with various publics. Going a step further, true PR has always been about building bi-directional channels that require PR practitioners to listen, understand and respond to public concerns and viewpoints in order to forge meaningful relationships between businesses and consumers. It has always been part of our job to bring the public perspective to an organization to enable it to be responsive to public concerns.
inmedia has always taken a highly personal approach to PR and these skills naturally transferred over to new media. This was no stretch, but a seamless extension of what we were already doing. We adapted our existing skills as we saw new outlets become available.
For example, even before Peter Merholz coined the term “blog” in 1999, we were already using the highly personalized approach necessary to be successful in new media. Unlike a lot of PR agencies, we have always taken a highly targeted approach to media relations that places a premium on knowing the target journalist and why she or he would be interested in our client’s story. This approach seamlessly and effectively transferred to pitching bloggers.
Even before the term “social media release” was coined by new-media thought leaders Tom Foremski, Todd Defren, Chris Heuer and Shel Holtz, we were incorporating its elements into our media outreach. In 2007, for example, when we were managing the global launch of the world’s most advanced prosthetic hand, the i-LIMB Hand, for British client Touch Bionics, we uploaded a video onto YouTube that yielded 100,000 views within a month. We also uploaded a slew of photographs on Flickr, which developed into an active social site for the amputee patient community. Other elements, now seen as part of a complete social media release, were made available on the company’s website.
As larger numbers of useful new channels become available, we are incorporating them into our outreach efforts by sifting through social media and other sites to find the appropriate channels to which we can offer meaningful content and start a conversation.
Now we’re going one step further. After years of looking at the evolution of our PR agency’s use of new media, we are persuaded that there is a new role for us to play – to help clients build the capacity to effectively use social media.
For some time now, we have been researching and developing new media strategies to guide our clients in the building and management of their own social media sites and online communities. Increasingly, with clients that don’t have their own internal resources or know how to use social media sites, we now are also doing at least the heavy lifting of monitoring and identifying opportunities to engage, if not the whole job of also developing and posting content and responding to feedback.
As long as we are authentic and honest, we don’t feel that there’s much of a difference between writing an article for a trade publication under our client’s byline — something that PR agencies have been doing for decades — and representing our clients’ voices in new media or Tweeting on their behalf.
As I continue my work with inmedia in building out our social media practice, I’d love to hear your thoughts regarding PR agencies adopting new practices.
By Linda Forrest
Close to three years ago now (where does the time go?!?!?), we blogged about PR’s bad rap.
According to ADWEEK, results of a recent Gallup poll suggest that our stock has increased of late (at least in the eyes of those questioned.) An inherent flaw in the poll is that it lumps together advertising and PR, the differences between which warrant their own blog post, if not an entire blog altogether. But, despite that major criticism of the industry categorization, the numbers still indicate that our industry isn’t as hated as it has been in the past.
Yay?
One-third of respondents to the survey voiced a positive opinion of the advertising-PR industry. This over and above various industries whose reputations are dismal, according to the poll – oil and gas (thanks, BP!), banking (thank you, mortgage crisis!) and the airlines (where someone thinks this is a good idea.)
One commenter, Sven, clearly doesn’t have a good opinion of us, however: “The fact these dark witches try and spin the banking, airline, pharmaceutical and oil companies is worse than being a politician.”
This raises an interesting point: aren’t we PR practitioners in part responsible for how the public perceives these industries? Is their bad reputation our failing? Or is their bad behaviour or shoddy customer service their own business and PR has little to nothing to do with it?
By Linda Forrest
The headline “Gawker Media Now Bigger Than All Newspapers Online–Except One” caught my interest for a number of reasons. In addition to being interested in all things media, I’m a fan of Gawker Media; in my professional life for media gossip and Valley news delivered with a healthy dose of sarcasm and in my personal life for hilarious movie news and intelligent commentary on women’s issues and interests. And while I applaud its growing audience and great success for its individual websites, I feel that comparing the conglomerate that houses each of these properties with specific newspaper websites is a ridiculous exercise.
I was glad to see one of the commenters on the original story point out this very fact.
MikeBarthel wrote on the Awl: “It confused me that “Gawker Media” is bundled together but other newspaper conglomorates are not. Shouldn’t “USA Today” actually be the traffic of all the Gannett papers, if we’re comparing it to all the Gawker sites? Similarly NYT/Boston Globe, WSJ/NewsCorp, etc. Am I missing something?”
You’re not alone, Mike. Nick Denton himself, publisher of Gawker Media, recognizes that the newspapers are but one slice of his competition. In a letter to his staff, he called out additional sources of online news such as Huffington Post, Yahoo and AOL.
You’ll note the reasons that I listed for visiting Gawker Media entities were pretty soft and fluffy. Hard news or astute political opinions were not among them. If I want to read what I would consider to be real news, I’d most certainly visit one of the other sites against which Gawker Media was compared. “Online news” casts a very wide net and it’s important to define key terms if you want to be clear about your position in the marketplace and what readers can expect from your online properties.
Twitter’s traffic undeniably trounces that of all other ornithological sites on the web, if not combined, but just because they’re using the same language doesn’t mean they’re talking about the same thing. It’s an important distinction, and one that we as PR practitioners have to be extremely careful about. It’s for this very reason that we learn our clients’ whole story so that we have a holistic understanding of the company, its business, its technology and its market. A term that means one thing to one person can mean something quite different to someone else; we need to be able to draw that distinction and then pursue the opportunities that make the most sense for our clients knowing full well that we’re speaking the same language as the media outlet we’re pursuing.
If the media wants apples, don’t give them persimmons. They’re just likely to throw them at you for not knowing your apples from your persimmons. I would have assumed that the likes of Nick Denton would have been conscious of the distinction.
By Francis Moran
Thankfully, we don’t get many pitches to this blog from fellow PR types trying to get us to cover their stuff; it’s obvious to all but the most dense that this is a corporate blog that really isn’t a conduit for media relations or blogger relations activities.
But such is the sad state of the PR business that it does happen. And it happened this morning.
Donatien Ratke from a French company called MailerLite — I’m deliberately not linking to the site — sent me not one but SIX emails this morning suggesting this blog write about his company’s “Next-generation email marketing tool.” That he even pitched this blog is a PR failure. Worse, though, is that I assume Donatien used his own new, next-generation email marketing tool, resulting in six identical emails, a clear failure of the software itself. Further, since I have absolutely no relationship with this company, have never given it permission to solicit me and the email has no opt-out mechanism, the whole thing qualifies as the worst sort of spam. That a so-called “next-generation email marketing tool” would even allow such grievous breaches of anti-spam regulations is a further catastrophic failure.
So, Donatien: Welcome to the harsh new world of blogger relations. You got your write-up, but it’s probably not what you were seeking. I hope the users of your new tool don’t make such a total hash of things.
