The news doesn't want to be free

Last week, Richard Engel, the long-time war correspondent currently with NBC News, won a much-deserved Peabody Award for his on-the-scene coverage of the war in Afghanistan. Every time I see the footage, I still get goose bumps. Here is a man crouching down in the corner of hilltop outpost, along with American soldiers from Viper Company firing in two directions into the mountains. From the camera angle peering up, you can actually see enemy ammunition passing mere inches from Engel's helmet and whispering through the flimsy camouflage. And like a weatherman covering converging air masses, Engel presents essentially a dissertation about the strategy of both the Taliban and al-Qaeda, some of which are shooting at him, at that moment.

After merely visualizing that footage for a few seconds, I find it pretty much impossible to count myself in the same column with Engel, under the title, "Journalist." There have been times when I'm covering a technology or a development conference, and a press relations specialist is rushing to validate a quote and refresh my grapefruit juice, when I would emphatically deny that Engel and I in the same business.

At what stage of complexity, what level of sacrifice, in the information gathering and reporting process, do we decide that the value of news is worth definitive, quantifiable compensation -- that news isn't free? Tuesday morning, the Associated Press announced it would begin taking measures to track the unlicensed aggregation of its stories and content (which includes many valuable photographs), and take more aggressive measures against publishers that appropriate it without compensation.

At its annual meeting in San Diego Monday night, AP Chairman Dean Singleton told attendees, "We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories."

Though he did not say so directly, Singleton was very likely referring to the belief that blogs and other Internet news sources are protected by federal fair use guidelines to the extent that they can reproduce nearly any amount as long as attribution is given. While those notions are still being tested in courts, the simple fact remains that AP content is private property, not public domain; and unlicensed duplication of it truly is misappropriation.

One of the most effective arguments against the AP's assertion comes from ZDNet's Larry Dignan, who argued Tuesday morning that in the modern environment where the very definition of news has metamorphosed, the AP cannot stake a rightful claim to news, for the most part because it fails to provide unique value to the underlying information. Where's the value-add, Dignan asks? He provides five examples of daily news stories covered by the AP whose sources were public databases, such as the SEC's Web site for public filings. The AP doesn't cite the SEC as its source; why should the world cite the AP for forwarding it on?

They're valid questions. I'll be honest: I'm not certain I could do the quantity of work I do every day for Betanews without the rapid availability of public data and the ubiquity of e-mail. Two decades ago, I typed requests for information on my Silver-Reed typewriter, weighed the envelopes, licked the requisite number of stamps, and waited weeks for a response. Today, I can make the same contacts, get the same verification, do the same amount of sourcing, produce the same degree of work, often in about 90 minutes' time. That way, I can do four or more of these per day rather than per month. Does that devalue the final quality of the work? I tend to think not...though if I could charge the same amount, I'd be making a seven-digit salary today.

So should this mean I don't deserve as much compensation as I did in 1988? Dignan might say yes. If he wouldn't mind my directly quoting him, "Few journalist types link to their source material." I'm not certain whether he meant to distinguish himself from "journalist types;" personally, I would have thought he qualified. In any event, his assertion appears to be this: If the only journalism that's valuable is the kind that can be qualified as original, and that can truly account for the sweat and toil that its reporters put into it, then most of what we do out here isn't really worth a dime, and most of what the AP publishes is really just another form of aggregation -- what Google News does, but with a surcharge.

And that's false. Other "journalist types" can cut-rate their own value if they want to, and I'll respect their right to do it, but I don't appreciate it when they discount the value of our whole profession. While there are a number of AP journalists reading the public databases of the SEC and the DOJ and the Library of Congress, there are others out there who periodically get shot at, and even killed. The work they produce, whether they spit it out of their BlackBerrys over lunch or in the middle of a foxhole beneath the crossfire, is intellectual property.

Those of us who have never been shot at (with the exception of the comments section) are still journalists. More and more, to present a more complete picture of the world, we repeat some of the facts we've heard elsewhere, and we try to give credit where credit is due. But we need to be careful, because in our complacency, we're advancing the false notion that repeated news, by virtue of its having been repeated once or twice or thousands of times before, is in the public domain, and therefore free. While the informational content therein may very well be free, the news itself -- the photos, video, and words with which it's presented -- is not.

Information may be free; news, if it's valuable at all, is the value-add. If the information being spat out by the minute on the SEC database had any broader meaning to it, and conveyed some holistic sense of comprehensibility about the nation's economy and the industries that comprise it, then people would be reading the SEC instead of MarketWatch and The Wall Street Journal. Information presents the facts; journalists tell the story. Information can be chaotic; journalists convey clarity and meaning. Information is not, by nature, intuitive; journalism is educational.

Now, it may be up to the Associated Press to prove its journalistic mettle once again, amid a false picture of the information economy where news is free, music is free, entertainment is free, and communication is free. But someone, somewhere, always pays for it -- with his time, his talent, his blood. A free press is not an entitlement, but an industry. Right now, its business model is in upheaval, but its survival depends on our ability and our willingness to build a new and viable system of fair and just compensation where we can give back to folks like Larry Dignan and folks like Richard Engel, in proportion to what they give to us.

[The opinions expressed here are those of Scott M. Fulton, III, who is solely responsible for his content. Accompanying image and embedded video are from Richard Engel reports on NBC Nightly News, October 20, 2008.]