Kellner's Interviewer Speaks Out

"Staci D. Kramer is a contributing editor of the USC Annenberg School for Communication's Online Journalism Review [Recommended - ed.] and is the journalist who conducted the interview with Jamie Kellner in which the head of Turner Broadcasting said skipping commercials was theft. See, LawMeme's (Top Ten New Copyright Crimes). She has now written an article about how the interview took off via the Internet (From Acorns to Mighty Oaks). The article is an interesting reaction by a mainstream journalist to how the Internet can grab something from the mainstream and masticate the heck out of it. Full disclosure, she calls LawMeme's post 'particularly clever', but feels we copied too much of her article. [via MetaFilter]" [LawMeme]

An excerpt from Kramer's article:

"But this is different. It’s proof of the power of making an article available free of charge -- even for a limited amount of time -- and the kind of payoff it can bring. It also demonstrates how little control journalists have over how readers perceive their work....

Most linked to the full interview even when excerpts were included; that started to change as people realized the original was no longer available for free....

I don’t remember ever having the chance to read so many reactions to something I’ve written....

The greatest irony to me, though, was the way this came about by happenstance just when I needed it to illustrate a point. I’d been trying to explain to an editor how Internet buzz can influence a story’s cycle and push it into the mainstream. I’d had plenty of experience with that phenomenon when I was at Inside.com like the day when I picked up a newspaper in Atlanta and saw a lead story about something that broke on Inside.  At last check, Turner had inquiries about Kellner’s PVR ideas pending from several major mainstream publications." [Online Journalism Review]

As I tracked this same story, I saw a lot of posts asking for pointers to the full article since it was no longer available for free on the Cableworld site. I excerpted quite a bit of the article in my original post because I've noticed how often the original source is unavailable when I simply link to an external article. (Obviously Ms. Kramer hasn't seen how much I excerpted from the article! Now I'm expecting a letter in the mail....) So if Cableworld is enjoying the fruits of a hearty meme, it might just be because folks like Ernest and myself put enough of the article out there to reach a tipping point. Otherwise, it probably would have died faster since no one had access to the "juicy" parts.

Once they saw the story spiking, Cableworld would have been wiser to open the article for free access and provide a discussion area. Then they would have gotten the lion's share of recognition and traffic. It was a failure on their part to accurately react to the situation. Selling one ad on those pages would probably have brought in far more than whatever money they received in individual sales for that article.

Also, this is a wonderful example of how newspapers fail to provide full context for their readers because they feel threatened by libraries providing online access to their archives. If those newspapers that picked up the story (either in print or online) had pointed readers to their local public libraries for full copies of the article, Cableworld would have made a lot more money from licensing their content to a third party service, they would have been mentioned more in citations (as would Ms. Kramer), and readers would have an easy way to judge Kellner's comments for themselves. It's a natural flow between newspapers (that disseminate information) and libraries (that disseminate information). We're complementary, not competitors.

And let's not forget that most people don't have Nexis in order to set up tracking for specific topics in the press. How does the average person do this from home? They search online archives (to which they could not afford access on their own) through their local public library's subscriptions. How would Ms. Kramer have dealt with the tracking without Nexis? Probably a lot more manual work or a librarian.

Final note: sometimes the most obvious links don't get provided in a post, so I'm not sure why Ms. Kellner complains about others not linking back to the Cableworld site. Witness the fact that Ms. Kramer provides several links within the above article, but none back to the Cableworld site itself, and none to the page where readers can purchase a copy of the full article on the Cableworld site. Even the most well-intentioned people forget to add these types of pointers, especially when they're intent is to make a specific point.