AR&D Reinventing Local Media

Suppose I were to tell you that the guys across town were going to send you lots of customers. Suppose I were to add that they were going to invest in the project. Suppose further that I added that it wouldn’t cost you a thing. Raise your hands if you oppose this.

I didn’t think so.

And yet, so many newspaper and TV sites can’t get past the concept of the link economy. There is this thinking that “if my competitor links to me, they are stealing my audience.” Explain to me how.

Let’s put this in bricks and mortar terms. You run a small bookstore. The big bookstore in town has decided to put up a sign in its store listing all the books you have. For every book they sell, they recommend related books that your specialty store sells. Sometimes people decide that, based on the titles, they’re not interested. But it never really costs you anything. The number of visits you get to your store doesn’t suffer; it increases.

Obviously, this works out great for everyone.

But many traditional media companies think you’re somehow “stealing” from them when you post a link to them. They see Google News as the enemy. They see local news aggregators as thieves.

GATEHOUSE MEDIA vs BOSTON.COM

The latest battle in this, frankly, silly war comes from my hometown. Boston.com has smartly built a news aggregator for the suburb of Newton. (Disclosure: I have worked with people at Boston.com.) The site is called Your Town Newton, and is a section within Boston.com. Your Town Newton is one of three town sites Boston.com has launched that aggregate information from various news sources. It’s a portal in much the same way Google News is. In fact, if I were to start a Newton Blog, it would look much the same.

Among the links are stories from the Newton TAB, the local newspaper and website published by GateHouse Media. The links sometimes include a sentence or two — a headline, usually — telling the reader what the story is about. The links go directly to the TAB. So, in essence, what the TAB has received is an unbelievable Christmas gift. The Boston Globe is publicizing the stories in the TAB for free. The Globe does get ad money from this section — but it doesn’t cost the TAB any lost revenue. Remember — people are reading the stories on the TAB’s site. It’s no different than linking from a blog or seeing the headline in your RSS reader.

What does GateHouse do with this present? It throws it in the Globe’s face. GateHouse Media is suing the Boston Globe in Federal Court for unlawful use of its content. According to the TAB:

Kirk Davis, president of GateHouse Media New England, said the company filed the lawsuit “to enforce its rights under the law and protect the integrity of its trademarks and original news content, in furtherance of its ability to provide hyper-local news coverage to its newspaper readers and Web site viewers in the communities throughout the greater Boston region which it has served over many years.”

The paper’s story goes on to report that the Boston.com practice is stealing money:

“In promoting the Your Town sites, Boston.com has noted that all stories are linked to their original source, thereby sending readers to GateHouse web sites. But the links bypass advertising on the homepages for the GateHouse sites, which, according to the complaint, is where GateHouse generates the majority of its online ad revenue for those papers.”

If GateHouse is indeed generating the majority of its online revenue on its homepages, it’s in BIG trouble. A typical site sees about 25% of its visits come to or through its homepage. The rest are from referrals, searches and links. So how does Boston.com sending traffic to GateHouse sites hurt GateHouse? And why doesn’t GateHouse sue everyone who links to them?

WHY GATEHOUSE MISSES OUT ON THE LINK ECONOMY

The real point that GateHouse misses is this: every link from Boston.com increases its “Google Juice.” A link from Boston.com - one of the country’s biggest regional websites - is gold. Google measures your site’s value, in part, by the quantity and quality of inbound links. And a link from Boston.com is a hell of a lot more valuable than a link from your average blog.

My partner, Terry Heaton, wrote in his essay “Links the Currency of the Machine” how links are a matter of Web 101:

Links have value. They are the currency of the web, and as the Machine gets smarter and is able to qualify and validate links, their value will increase. Like any other currency, they will be traded for goods and services. If you link to me, I should pay you for that, because it has real value to me. As media companies, we should think carefully about this.

A permanent link — or as least as permanent as the web permits — has the highest value, for it keeps on giving.

Dan Gillmor writes that the case may hinge on how Boston.com went about importing the GateHouse headlines. He references the actual complaint (posted here by Dan Kennedy of the Boston Phoenix) where GateHouse claims it implemented measures specifically aimed at blocking Boston.com:

Lacking any cooperation from defendant, GateHouse implemented certain electronic security measures on Wicked Local, to prevent users with a certain Boston.com Internet Protocol (”IP”) address from scraping content from GateHouse’s website. Plaintiff’s security measures did not deter defendant in the least — defendant posted original content to the Infringing Website the very next day after they were installed.

Writes Gillmor: “…if (this allegation is) true, (it) makes me much more sympathetic to GateHouse. Indeed, it’s up to GateHouse in the end if it wishes to hide from the reality of the link economy. There’s no law against bad business practices.

THE GLOBE’S SIDE

GateHouse was one of the early adopters of the Creative Commons license. It had a vision of people sharing its content. Truly — it was a radical idea. But it says that the for-profit Boston.com, by linking to it, violates the CC license.

As for the Boston Globe, its parent company, The New York Times is on the right side of this argument:

“Far from being illegal or improper, this practice of linking to sites is common and is familiar to anyone who has searched the Web,” (New York Times spokeswoman Catherine) Mathis said. “It is fair and benefits both Web users and the originating site.”

Damn right it does.

“Send them away to bring them back.” It’s one of my key messages to our clients. At a time when papers are getting killed, does GateHouse really want to tie up its money with lawyers as it literally makes a federal case over web links?