Techmeme founder: WSJ, NYT are aggregators

Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera says lots of people in print journalism know aggregating news is fair but said "this knowledge just hasn't reached AP's and News Corp.'s leadership."

(Credit: Gabe Rivera)

Updated at 3:40 p.m. PDT to include Wall Street Journal's deals for some of the news that it aggregates.

Techmeme is one of the sites that Robert Thomson, managing editor of the The Wall Street Journal, presumably thinks is a "parasite" or "tech tapeworm in the intestines of the Internet."

The Web site aggregates links to stories. Along with the links is a short description of the news. Thomson and others in the newspaper industry say it's unfair and unlawful for Web sites to profit from their content without compensating them. On the same day that Thomson made his comments, William Dean Singleton, chairman of the The Associated Press, sized up how many in print journalism feel about sites that aggregate news: "We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore."

But Gabe Rivera, who founded Techmeme, a popular tech-news aggregation site, suggests that Techmeme displays only a short snapshot of a story. This, says Rivera, serves only to promote the content.

"All successful Web publishers want their content quoted and linked," Rivera wrote in an e-mail to CNET News. "The benefits are clear. Some prefer that the quotes remain short...these are precisely the kind that Google and Techmeme use. So for AP and News Corp. to discourage quoting is a clue that they don't really get the Web and are in danger of shooting themselves in the foot."

Rivera also noted that the Journal and The New York Times also aggregate news.

"It's illuminating to observe that both WSJ (a News Corp. property) and NYT (a key AP member) are both themselves news aggregators," Rivera wrote. "Both maintain sections which quote headlines from external sites. So, constituents of these organizations already know aggregation is useful and fair. This knowledge just hasn't reached AP's and News Corp.'s leadership."

The Journal and Times do have cooperative exchanges with some publications. Dow Jones, the Journal's parent company, operates the Factiva service, a database of business stories and other information, which has financial arrangements with numerous news outlets. But the Journal does aggregate some Web content without compensating owners, according to a source with knowledge of the company's business partnerships.

On Tuesday, Google defended itself and other aggregation sites in a blog post.

"We show snippets and links under the doctrine of fair use enshrined in the United States Copyright Act," wrote Google associate general counsel Alexander Macgillivray on Google's blog. "Even though the Copyright Act does not grant a copyright owner a veto over such uses, it is our policy to allow any rights' holder, in this case newspaper or wire service, to remove their content from our index--all they have to do is ask us or implement simple technical standards."

Both Thomsom and Singleton hinted that their companies may consider mounting legal challenges to sites that package news stories without permission.

[Don_Dodge]

Gabe Rivera is right, the New York Times does aggregate blog posts and other news From Around The Web. The NYT has a product called Blogrunner that aggregates stories and displays them alongside their own stories. Just today the NYT listed my blog and headline about Freemium models for newspapers. See http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/technology/internet/08google.html?_r=1&ref=media

I am not complaining, in fact I like it. But to point the finger at Techmeme and then do the same thing is a little hypocritical.

[Pete Saman]

How sweet, these guys are going the same way as the big 3 auto makers. The news sources that will survive are the ones who have already made the leap to online only distribution such as the Christian Science Monitor and more recently the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

[zenlive]

Asking AP to understand technology is like asking the big 3 to make small fuel-efficient/hybrid cars - it just can't be done. The culture (at least the leadership) is too ingrained with the old industrial complex way of thinking and doing things (namely, we dictate to the market and we own the distribution).

I predict that within 10 years time, AP will cease to exist and a new, more innovative news organization that fully embraces the internet will rise from its ashes.

[t8]

"Both Thomsom and Singleton hinted that their companies may consider mounting legal challenges to sites who package news stories without permission."

And when they win, Google and other companies will be forced to not include links to their web sites. That will be a victory alright. A victory for news sites that are included as they will have less competition.

Go hard News Corp. This will be entertaining.

The ironic thing is that the printing press itself was once a revolution and some stuck people stuck with the hand-written stuff and ignored cheaper printed stuff.

[wshwe]

Newspapers are as brain dead as music companies.

[davezatz]

Oh the irony... LOVE that shirt.

[GeeksRadio-swordofdestiny]

So does that mean that they can sue us (Geeks Radio) if we talk about news they cover for our news segments?
If they win, the best thing to do would be for any blogger who gets linked to by the NYT/WSJ to sue them for it. Fair is fair, you know.

[MAL313]

Curators provide a valuable service to both readers and publishers. When I created the Beyond the Headlines section of www.FindingDulcinea.com two years ago, I was simply building a product I wanted to use - one that would provide a full context look at a story that was only getting the headline treatment in most other publications. News readers have been saying for years that they want to be able to access all available information about a topic, including background information and opposing views. Most news organizations refuse to provide this, or do a poor job of doing so. And then they loudly complain that others are doing it well, and stealing all their former readers as a result.

[misslynds]

Those kids and their new-fangled media! They're going to put someone's eye out!

[OurSeat]

This is truly beautiful. Media companies are built on the foundation of aggregating consumers' possessions (time, attention, personal information, etc). My time belongs to me, but media gets the money simply because they aggregate me. And now media is complaining about being aggregated? That's rich.

Media companies are losing control over the ad economy...there are too many of them to control supply and without the ability to control supply, the model simply doesn't work. Consumers no longer need media companies to aggreagate them. They can do it themselves and take control of the ad economy. I explain this further on my blog www.OurSeatAtTheTable.com

[mlstephens]

This is kinda BS. Since when is the news copyrighted? This has nothing to do with getting credit for a person's work, its just wanting the biggest possible piece of the pie they can get. It's not like the people who wrote the stories have made some kind of a personal piece of work. They wrote a story about events that are taking place. Its BS that they now say that other people can't link to them and give a short description. Correct me if I'm wrong but is not what google and others do with news no different than when I send a news link to my brother and tell him what the story is about? Are they gonna start suing me next?