Posted on 04/07/2009 9:57:16 PM PDT by Islander7
US newspaper owners, their advertising revenue evaporating, their circulation declining and their readership going online to get news for free, are fighting mad.
The enemy? Websites that use their stories without paying for them.
"We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any more," said the chairman of the Associated Press, a cooperative of over 1,400 US newspapers, borrowing a line from the anchorman character in the 1976 movie "Network."
"We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories," Dean Singleton said at a meeting this week of the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) in San Diego, California.
Singleton's battle cry came just a few days after News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch launched a broadside against Internet giant Google, whose Google News website is one of the most popular news aggregators on the Internet.
"Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?" asked Murdoch, the owner of newspapers in Australia, Britain and the United States, where his holdings include The Wall Street Journal and New York Post.
"Thanks, but no thanks," the News Corp. chairman said.
Robert Thomson, the managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, used even harsher language than his boss in describing the situation.
"There is no doubt that certain websites are best described as parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet," Thomson said in an interview with the newspaper The Australian.
"It's certainly true that readers have been socialized -- wrongly I believe -- that much content should be free," he said. "And there is no doubt that's in the interest of aggregators like Google who have profited from that mistaken perception."
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
haha...someone sue them! ; )
Bu Bye
Boy, that's true. They also have the problem their most fervent political allies have been dumbed down by public education to the point THEY CANNOT READ!
Beautiful!
Too funny. For years this same media blasted capitalism and now they want “their” property protected from those who they trained to hold personal property rights null and void.
Well, we’re extremely angry too and we’re not going to take it (the newspaper) any more. As someone posted early on...certainly it’s not the CONTENT, is it?
AP == Absurd Propaganda
Sorry, guys — but you need to consider the number of people who don’t even read the crap you print as soon as they see you’re the source.
It’s not that we’re getting our news online as much as we’re ignoring your stories, wherever they appear.
Linking to their websites doesn't affect their revenue .the fact that newspaper advertisment is no longer worth it does.
Why pay ty advertise in the paper when you can advertise for free at Craiglist or put up your own website for a fraction of what they charge.
They're doomed
The ‘journalist’ creed:
WHO... can I destroy today?
WHAT...will it do for my career?
WHERE...is the camera?
WHY...let the truth stand in your way?
Adios, jerks!
Not really a good example. King Canute was wise king. His court lavished so much false praise on him that he ordered the sea to roll back to prove that he couldn’t do it. They got the point.
Considering that nothing in a newspaper is anything but a political opinion piece, it seems fair to use it as a discussion topic. If there were truly breaking news articles I could see the complaint but every newspaper steals from every other news source and then injects liberal bias, making the articles stolen political opinion pieces themselves. What are they complaining about?
courtesy ping
Did you hear about 0 trying to control the climate?
Obama May Block Sun’s Rays to End Global Warming (They really do think he’s god)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2225038/posts
I find it funny that this article is posted on FR.
Then again the aggregators drive traffic to the papers and AP.
Whatever...
If we could go back 65 million years and have a sound recording of what dinosaurs said to each other as they saw the giant asteroid in the sky, it would sound much like this article reads.
Oooh, I hope they go through with this. Then no one will link to their crappy stories.
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