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boston.com to try its hand at hyperlocal
By adamg on Sat, 11/08/2008 - 5:25pm
Chuck Tanowitz reports boston.com is going to be launching a series of city- and town-specific Web sites built atop content from users and links to content from other sites and with lower ad rates in an attempt to bring in local advertisers.
The first one, in Newton, launches next week and "will be an aggregate of news and information from online sources around the city, whether that's from the Newton TAB, this site or any of the other blogs around town." The site will have an editor, responsible for selecting only the finest, choicest Newton items, a Wiki, a Newton specific calendar and forums.
As Chuck notes, there are some interesting intellectual property issues (you post something on the Wiki, who owns the copyright?) as well as some interesting business/community issues (the goal seems to be to offer a site with lower ad rates than boston.com, so what happens if it succeeds in driving Wicked Local out of business?). Also: Will boston.com realize Newton is a city rather than a town before the thing launches?
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Comments
Copyright is sticky
As any traditional journalist knows, your copyright to material lives with your employer. But if you're a freelancer, you retain rights until signed over to someone.
So, if you are a freelancer writing for the Tab or any Newton publication and Boston.com picks up your content without paying you for the digital rights, you've been taken advantage of.
Right now, many publications - including Gatehouse Media's papers - pay a set rate for all rights, online and off.
It's the same situation that caused a MAJOR uproar years ago when the NY Times had to battle its contributors for online rights to pieces that appeared in the print edition.
For people who buy their groceries with the money earned from selling content - me included - I'll watch this development very closely.
YIKES.
Copyright
I suspect the model for their bloggy stuff will be something similar to what I'm doing (or what boston.com does now with that one link on their home page) - linking to other people's stuff, rather than expropriating it whole (at least, I hope so). I was thinking more about the person who contributes some in-depth piece to the Wiki. Who now owns the copyright for that?
'bout Time
Oh, if only there were some hyperlocal website that digested neighborhood, city and town events. Oh, if only someone had already created a central site that also let bloggers and plain ole citizens comment and add news, views and photos.
That Globe is always a trend setter.
ouch
don't we count?
http://boston.povo.com
We don't do news so much as the wiki/search/listings side of it, but I'm certainly viewing this Boston.com thing as a competitor. We're Creative Commons licensed though, which I hope/feel is an important difference.
I'd imagine Outside.in and perhaps UH would/should view them as competitors too. Seems standard Boston.com behavior though, and to their detriment. They don't seem to be able to partner effectively and end up building look-a-likes late. (or is that my bias?) They certainly have a big mouthpiece though, so not to be taken lightly.
NY Times story - copyright lawsuit with freelancers
Here's the link to the story I referenced above..
NY Times uses freelancers stuff online without permission.
UH vs. Globe hyperlocal
I guess the real difference is how much of the "borrowed" content is displayed on the site. UH holds it down by providing teasers and link-outs, but leaving the actual content on the site that generated it.
Is the Globe planning to follow the same model, or just swipe the content and provide attribution? For a blog like ours with no resources, we depend on people actually following the links to our site when our features are highlighted.
I've changed my description
I originally wrote something like "built atop content from other sites ..." which I realize now sounds too much like theft, which isn't what Chuck wrote and which I doubt is one of the legs of the Globe's hyperlocal business model, so my apologies for sloppy phrasing. Based on his description, it really sounds like what I do here (and which Wicked Local has been doing for awhile on its blogs, too).
But it's still pretty confusing
Somewhere out there in the fairy dust of the Internet, "content" has to "originate"
It's all well and good to criticize the sloppy work that passes for "reportage" these days, particularly in the ever-declining Globe, particularly because as an NYT property they oughta know better.
But someone's got to go out and not just cobble words together, but conduct research, ask hard questions, dig, spend cash to buy information that's not freely available, and be ready to time and again put forth Intellectual Risk Capital* for work that may not turn into a publishable/profitable story.
Here I only see that they're only in a position to displace this duty yet again. What does it mean when the provider of intellectual risk capital jumps to the other side of the fence? Where does the hard work get done? Don't say "bloggers". They don't have the capital - time or money - to do what newspapers once did. Neither do newspapers for that matter, but I think that is newspapers' fault.
-
* I hereby declare author/owner-ship of this phrase. Hiawatha Bray, don't take it.
This is good news for
This is good news for Boston.com/NYTCo. From the brief description, sounds like they're doing something that they should've done years ago.
I like Wicked Local Cambridge, and would hate to see this eat into their revenue. So far, Wicked Local has been more agile than Boston.com, but not seemed to have as much resources as they could really use. Perhaps this move by Boston.com will prompt Wicked Local to invest a little more and improve their game. Competition can be healthy.
I'd mention Universal Hub here, but I'm hoping it will be off the radar of Boston.com and Wicked Local, and remain its own entity. :)
(Full disclosure: the Cambridge Chronicle and its Wicked Local counterpart have used my freelance news photos on at least one occasion. I no longer do photojournalism.)
Boston.com goes hyperlocal?
The difference between U-Hub and Boston.com is that Adam G. actually gives local journalists/bloggers credit for their work--and hyperlinks his posts to the original source.
Boston.com blatantly rips off content and story ideas from local bloggers and repackages it as a Globe story without giving proper attribution.
They consistently take story ideas from my blog (I can track globe.com editors going to my site, target a story idea, contact my sources, then write a story from my posts).
Here's an example of story that the Globe literally ripped from my blog:
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/09/...
Adam also featured the story on U-Hub but gave me credit:
http://www.universalhub.com/node/16651
My thoughts on Boston.com going hyperlocal and using content from the community? Don't trust 'em.
advertising by Boston.com
on WTKK, (Graham/"Boston Globe Democrat") tells me that it's all about the benjamins...
Time for a Hoax
If they like to take your content and pass it off as their own, screw them royally with a fine red-blooded American hoax. Enlist a few friends to enrich the story as contacts.
Print your "retraction" after the story runs. Fun times!