Local news is the most expensive news. A news organization can hire someone to report about national or world events and his work may be of interest to millions of people. But the work of a reporter assigned to local topics is of interest only to the much smaller number of people in that area, even as local news is often the news most in demand.
That’s the economics of the dispute between, on one side, the Journal Inquirer and newspapers in New Britain, Bristol, Torrington, and Waterbury, and, on the other, the Hartford Courant. The Courant’s parent company, Tribune Co., is in bankruptcy because of a mistimed leveraged buyout, and the Courant has eliminated about half of its news staff over the last two years. While the layoffs have saved the Courant a lot of money, they have shown up in the loss of town news coverage. So the Courant has formally undertaken to appropriate wholesale the local news of its competitors in a practice politely called “aggregation,” a practice better understood as plagiarism and theft.
While apologizing for plagiarism that occurred in the first month of “aggregation,” during which it took dozens of local news stories from the JI and other competing papers, sometimes attaching its own bylines, the Courant maintains that “aggregation” is all right as long as proper credit is given to the news organizations from which the news has been taken.
Of course this is not all right with the news organizations whose news has been taken, for the Courant is profiting from the work only they pay to produce. This also may be a violation of copyright law, since the “fair use” exception in the law, which allows brief quotation of copyrighted material to advance public discourse, has been construed much more narrowly than the Courant construes it.
For it’s one thing if Martians land in East Windsor, the Journal Inquirer reports it exclusively, and the Courant, unable to contact the spaceship, repeats the report with attribution. Such an event would be a matter of great importance far beyond East Windsor, and in such special circumstances news organizations often quote each other that way. But it’s something else if the Journal Inquirer reports that East Windsor’s Board of Selectmen has approved a sidewalk project and the Courant repeats the JI’s reporting about this and similarly local matters every day.
The Courant says it is reviewing its “aggregation” practices, and whether this dispute lands in court may be a matter of whether the paper continues taking so much from its competitors.
Tribune acquired the Courant and the rest of the Times Mirror chain of media properties in 2000 precisely to combine Times Mirror’s newspapers with Tribune’s television stations, including two in Connecticut, in violation of federal broadcast regulations against concentration of media ownership. Since then, Tribune has been operating its two Connecticut stations under a series of waivers from the Federal Communications Commission. Tribune is consolidating the operations of the TV stations with those of the Courant to assemble a media monolith that is to preside over all Connecticut.
Throughout the rule breaking, plagiarism, and candid theft, Connecticut’s political officials have mostly stood aside fecklessly. In April Attorney General Richard Blumenthal wrote to Tribune CEO Sam Zell to express concern that the Courant’s consolidation with the TV stations would reduce their editorial independence. Zell replied that the Courant and the TV stations would keep making news decisions independently — even as the TV stations’ manager was put in charge of the newspaper and the TV studios were prepared for relocation into the Courant’s building. But the attorney general dropped the issue and went back to chasing prostitutes who advertise on the Craigslist Internet site, overlooking those who advertise in Tribune’s own Connecticut weekly, the Advocate.
Even in bankruptcy, Tribune is bigger than the attorney general. Will it prove bigger than copyright law too?
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer.
Reader response:
“I’m so proud of my former employer.” — Janet Hladky, Flametree Communications
