I know drug dealers give our their goods for free to build up a customer base, secure in the knowledge that, once hooked, their clients will pay whatever is asked. That might even work for something like ice cream. I do not think it will work for newspapers:
Newsday appears poised to break from the newspaper pack with a plan by parent Cablevision Systems Corp. to end free content on the paper’s Web site.
While specifics of the plan remain unclear, Cablevision chief operating officer Tom Rutledge - on a conference call Thursday - drew a link between declining newspaper fortunes in general and plans for Newsday in particular.
They won’t buy your online material, and they probably won’t go back to your print edition, either. Meanwhile, one newspaper out west has come up with the perfect solution for declining circulation:
DENVER (AP) — E.W. Scripps (SSP)says its Rocky Mountain News in Denver will close aftter publishing Friday’s edition.
The company says its search for a buyer for Colorado’s first newspaper was unsuccessful. The newspaper is closing just two months short of its 150th anniversary.
Scripps bought the News in 1926.
Scripps CEO Rich Boehne said in a statement that the newspaper is “a victim of changing times in our industry and huge economic challenges.” Scripps says the paper lost $16 million last year.
What’s scary to me is that the two newspapers had a joint operating agreement and neither of them was especially dominant. They each had circulations of 210,000 and some. But the Rocky Mountain News blinked, just because it lost a pittance. $16 million in one year? Come on, GM lost $9.6 billion in just one quarter. Buncha wimps.
After a rigorous content analysis (PDF) spanning more than half a century of articles in National Review, The Weekly Standard, The American Enterprise, and The American Spectator, George Mason University economist Daniel Klein and graduate student Jason Briggeman conclude, basically, that conservatives are not libertarians. On issues related to drugs, gambling, and sex, Klein and Briggeman find, these magazines have been more likely to support the status quo or increased restrictions on freedom than to advocate liberalization.
As shocking as you might find it, a rigorous content analysis of magazines like The New Republic, The Nation and Mother Jones is likely to reveal that liberals aren’t libertarians, either. It’s a cliche and overly simplistic, but conservatives want to keep government out of the boardroom and liberals want to keep government out of the bedroom. So a libertarian would say that each phllosophy is half right.
The NBA has reportedly borrowed $200 million to distribute to interested teams due to the struggling economy.
[. . .]
The reports said at least 12 teams have requested funds, with as many as 15 wanting money that could potentially help cover losses.
In tough economic times, doesn’t our obsession with organized sports seem a little silly? Or maybe you think this is the time when we need harmless diversions more than ever. Why isn’t anybody proposing the players take a pay cut by the way? They get, I think, about 57 percent of the NBA’s revenue, so a 10 percent cut ought to just about cover the $200 million. Or maybe basketball could consider downsizing, the way everyone else has. Let’s see, we make a team four players instead of five, so that means fewer backup players would be needed as well. We could get rid of one assistant coach per team. We could do with one less official on the court.
Then, when fans rebel and stop going to the games, increase the ticket cost by, oh, 1,000 percent. And sneak an NBA-stimulus tax into our phone bills where we won’t notice it.
See, I can, too, learn from the federal government.
Hey, Indianapolis is trying to steal our casino idea:
Here’s an unlikely but plausible scenario that could unfold as the General Assembly’s current session marches toward a frantic finish:
Legislative leaders look for a way to plug the deficit plaguing the city’s Capital Improvement Board, which operates Lucas Oil Stadium, Conseco Fieldhouse and other venues.
Casino owners in Anderson and Shelbyville offer to give back some of their slot machines to create a casino in Union Station. It might hurt their revenues at the horse tracks in Madison and Shelby counties, but they would still gain a foothold in the state’s largest city. The city in turn would get a stream of revenue to pay for the stadium deficit. Union Station also would gain a new lease on life.
As the writer notes, Fort Wayne has dibs on 500 of those slot machines from Hoosier Park in Anderson, whose owner faces serious financial dtrouble and is restructuring its debt.
I’m not sure exactly where the writer stands, though. First, he lists all the reasons his scenario probably won’t come about, principally because everybody from the mayor to the governor is against the idea. Then he closes by saying we were promised there would never be any gambling in Indiana except a state lottery and horse racing, and now “we have riverboat gambling on Lake Michigan and the Ohio River, casinos in Shelbyville and Anderson, and off-track betting parlors. And the casinos are pleading for new tax breaks because business is so bad. Addiction to gambling is hard to reverse once started.
Oh, and just in case you think I’m not a conscientious blogger, I became curious about the origin of “dibs” and wasted a good 15 minutes (well, they would have been good 25 minutes) discovering that nobody really knows. If Eric Zorn thinks so, that’s good enough for me.
Whether to give Washington, D.C., a real, voting member of Congress is the latest bone Democrats and Republicans are fighting over.
Dissatisfied with the status quo but unable to alter it with a constitutional amendment, Washingtonians finally exclaimed: Amendment? We don’t need no stinkin’ amendment!
The rationale is that the Constitution, which provides for the capital, gives Congress the power “to exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever, over such District.” Therefore, it may do just about anything it pleases, including give the District a vote in the House.
But the argument proves too much.
Most would (or should) agree that the present situation is intolerable, since “taxation without representation” have been fighting words for all of this country’s history. Those who insist on the quaint notion of adhering to the Constitution say an amendment to that document should be required, since it plainly says that members of the House of Representatives are to be chosen by the people of the states. Some suggest that all D.C. nonfederal sections simply be given back to Maryland, which would be difficult for several reasons (today’s new word — retrocede).
So, why not do the obvious? If there should be no taxation without representation, unless and until one of the vote-enabling solutions is achieved, stop charging D.C. residents federal taxes. We already do this for other places that have American citizens but no voting member of Congress, such as Puerto Rico and Guam, so it wouldn’t exactly be breaking new ground.
The Reason article linked to, by the way, opens with one of the better Abraham Lincoln anecdotes:
Legend has it that Abraham Lincoln once posed a riddle: How many legs does a dog have if you count his tail as a leg? Came the answer, “Five.” Replied Lincoln, “No, four. Counting a tail as a leg doesn’t make it a leg.”
First, Chief Justice John Roberts quoted Bob Dylan in a decision. Now, justice Samuel Alito quotes John Lennon:
Alito, 58, makes the point that public monuments can convey multiple messages, or messages that change over time. The Statue of Liberty, for example, came to New York as a symbol of friendship between France and the United States, Alito said, and only later became viewed as a beacon welcoming immigrants.
Similarly — and here’s where Lennon comes in — the mosaic in Central Park in New York City that displays the word “Imagine” as part of the memorial to John Lennon conveys several messages. “Some observers may ‘imagine’ the musical contributions that John Lennon would have made if he had not been killed,” Alito said, while others might think of Lennon’s song by that name, which imagined “a world without religion, countries, possessions, greed or hunger.”
Alito then drops a footnote that offers the full text of Lennon’s lyrics to the song “Imagine.”
I sure hope this ends the whole church and state controversy, which is getting to be a real drag. I mean, let’s move on, you know? See it my way, people. Life is very short, and there’s no time for fussing and fighting, my friend.
Washington, D.C., February 23, 2009–Sales of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” have almost tripled over the first seven weeks of this year compared with sales for the same period in 2008. This continues a strong trend after bookstore sales reached an all-time annual high in 2008 of about 200,000 copies sold.
I still like the “reverse Atlas” idea, too, though. Everybody who’s been putting in, start figuring ways to take out, and let somebody else carry the load for awhile.
That’s all I can stands, I can’t stands no more, Thursday entry:
The state’s new voter referendums, aimed at giving Hoosiers the power over whether to raise taxes for publicly funded projects, would be tossed out the window under a bill approved by the Indiana House on Wednesday.
School and other public construction projects no longer would be subject to the referendums — approved last year as part of sweeping taxpayer relief legislation — as long as the buildings meet certain energy-efficiency standards.
House Democrats pushed for House Bill 1730, saying they wanted to remove the hurdles posed by referendums so that local school districts and governments can more quickly spend federal stimulus dollars on “green” projects.
But the bill makes no mention of federal stimulus money and would apply only to projects funded by property taxes. The bill’s author later said he was open to amending the legislation so that it applies only to projects that receive money from the federal stimulus.
Did you follow that? Our voter referendums, and therefore this bill, involves only projects funded by property taxes, which means this has no connection to federal stimulus money whatsoever. But the stimulus package is a great excuse for some legislators to revert to “spend, spend, screw the taxpayers, then spend some more” type. All this “save America” and “invest for the future” crap can be made to sound great in the rarefied atmosphere of Washington, but as it trickles down to local jurisdictions it’s harder to disguise what it actually is: More government spending, which requires more tax dollars. We have it, they want it, so just put up and shut up.
Thank goodness the GOP-led Senate is there to stop such nonsense. Don’t you wish we still had a Republican Senate in D.C., too? Even back when the GOP had the majority, it would have been nice to have a Republican Senate, huh?
The Indianapolis Star has compiled a nifty database of Indiana employee salaries, so we’re now able to look up how much our favorite bureaucrat or lawmaker gets. It’s no great surprise that the highest-paid public employee in this basketball-crazy state is Tom Crean, the IU coach. He gets a base salary of $600,000, but built-in contract extras guarantee him $2.36 million a year — that makes it nearly $400,000 per victory this season so far! It’s also not too startling that Gov. Daniels, with a paltry $95,000 a year, is way down on the list.
Of the 22 highest-paid state government employees who don’t work in academia, 20 of them are psychiatrists or psychiatric medical directors. They all make between $150,000 and $243,586 a year …
I don’t know what all those shrinks do, but just a casual look around tells me we’re obviously not getting our money’s worth.
Newspapers frequently hear complaints from groups that they aren’t being treated fairly, and some of them won’t give up the complaint even if you go through back copies with them and prove them dead wrong. The one we’ve probably dealt with the most here is from southside residents, who say we put their part of town in headlines about crimes much more often than we do other parts of town. If Johnny gets nabbed for drugs in the Glenbrook parking lot, then we’ll just slap a generic ”Police make drug arrest” headline on the story and forget about it. But if Johnny gets pinched in the Southgate parking lot, well, then, our innate prejudice against the south side just naturally kicks in and we are determined to write a headline like “Another crazed druggie barely avoids police shootout on the scary south side.” A former editor once sat down with somebody and proved, by going through old stories with a search engine, that we did no such thing and was told, I swear, “You’re just making that up. Those aren’t the real stories that were in the paper.”
Sports departments get their share, too. Area sports teams are always complaining that we ignore their victories while writing glowing accounts of city teams’ losses. Band parents are notorious for pleading the plight of their progeny, who must toot and bang and march in total obscurity while the basketball teams get all the glory. But the biggest pains, it seems to me as an outside observer, are Purdue fans, who are forever claiming that our sports department is IU-centric, and they are forever sending us lengthy accounts of Purdue events that we completely ignored.
Well, never let it be said that Opening Arguments slights anybody. I came across two Purdue stories I thought I would share with you. The first is from northwest Indiana and involves the old gun-in-a-hollowed-out-book gag:
Jeffrey Grupp, an instructor from Purdue University-North Central, who teaches classes at Westville Correctional, was entering the facility shortly after noon. He was also bringing in a milk crate filled with books.
When staff ran the crate through the X-ray machine, they noticed an outline that did not appear normal. Upon further inspection, a gun was found inside a hollowed out book, a Westville Correctional official said.
Grupp said he is a gun enthusiast who carries the weapon in a book because he has to keep it concealed, and he just forgot he had it that day because he was very stressed out. He teaches, by the way, ethics and religions of the East. “Is that a gun in your book, Grasshopper, or are you just happy to see me?”
Purdue University announced Wednesday it had ended a weeklong investigation into allegations of cheating in an engineering class.
Ten students enrolled in the ECE 270 sophomore-level course have been cited for academic dishonesty, according to Steve Akers, the university’s executive associate dean of students.
It is entirely possible that Indiana University professors have been caught with guns in the wrong places, and there is no doubt that an IU student has cheated occasionally. But IU will just have to wait its turn — the spotlight today belongs to Purdue.
No whining, please — I’m a Ball Stater and don’t really care about your petty rivalries. And I went to BSU on the GI Bill, which I earned partly by a tour of Vietnam, so I don’t want to hear ANY nonsense about what little respect your silly school gets. It doesn’t MATTER, OK?
Mother Jones is downright ecstatic about BHO’s speech last night:
The speech—a State of the Union stand-in—presented a clear, mostly left-of-center agenda for his presidency and a series of forceful rationales for his proposed actions.
[. . .]
Obama had laid out a stunningly grand game plan: fix the economy, solve the housing crisis, save Wall Street, transform America’s energy system, revive its education system, renew and expand its health care system, and lessen the deficit—and, oh yes, while crushing al Qaeda and resolving wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he outlined all this with a can-do attitude that seemed more than canned optimism.
Sure glad it was only mostly a left-of-center agenda. Don’t think I could stand any more can-do than we’ve already witnessed.
If you’re a little ticked over the idea that responsible home owners are being treated like suckers while the irresponsibile ones get bailed out, you’ll love this:
Mayor Bill White yanked a controversial plan Tuesday that called for the city to use taxpayer funds to pay off some personal debts for first-time homebuyers, following a flood of outrage and criticism from across the city and beyond.
“I don’t think we ought to be in the business of paying off someone’s debt so they can buy a house,” White conceded during an impassioned City Council meeting. “Paying off people’s credit cards is ridiculous.”
Many council members expressed “embarrassment” over the idea, which received national media attention after the Chronicle wrote about it in Tuesday’s editions. The story appeared to strike a nerve among taxpayers already angry over the recession, the housing meltdown, and federal bailouts of banks and automobile companies.
You think that’s as outrageous as this is going to get before it’s all over?
Apparently, “separation of church and state” does not reach to presidential appearances. Ryan Culp of Elkhart agreed to open President Obama’s town halll meeting with a prayer, even though he’s a conservative Republican. He even agreed to have the prayer “vetted” by White House officials to make sure there was nothing in it that would offend anyone. This seems to be standard for Obama – both the prayers and the vetting:
During Obama’s recent visit to Fort Myers, Fla., to promote his economic stimulus plan, a black Baptist preacher delivered a prayer that carefully avoided mentioning Jesus, lest he offend anyone in the audience. And at Obama’s appearance last week near Phoenix to unveil his mortgage bailout plan, an administrator for the Tohono O’odham Nation delivered the prayer, taking the unusual step of writing it down so he could E-mail it to the White House for vetting. American Indian prayers are typically improvised.
There’s a lot in this for conservatives and liberals, Democrats and Republicans, religionists and atheists to all talk about. Some are already playing the “bet they wouldn’t have let Bush get away with this” victim card, and there seems to be some concern over the White House “entangling itself in core theological matters.” But what strikes me, as it does for the “nonsectarian prayers” offered as a compromise in the Great Indiana House Prayer Debate, is how meaningless the prayers become. A prayer that is true to the religion of the person offering it is bound to be at least a little offensive to those of other faiths. These White House-approved prayers are certain to be bland and worthless. This is political, not religious.
The Muncie Star Press, quick to pick up on a trend, wants to know how much its readers still use “snail mail.” But don’t go looking for those stamps to send in your answers:
Send your comments (by e-mail, please — ironically, we can’t wait for mailed ones!) …
In the old days, we could turn a story like this around in a couple of hours with, you know, the telephone. And we picked the people to be interviewed instead of letting them pick us. So old school.
A bill originally intended to give Michigan City’s Blue Chip Casino a financial leg up in its fight against the nearby Four Winds Casino in New Buffalo, Mich., was expanded by the state House of Representatives Tuesday to include all Indiana casinos.
Can’t have any of those places going under. If we have any money left after the government gets through saving us, we need to have lots of options when it comes to investing it wisely.
OLYMPIA, Wash. – The state is sending out hundreds of thousands of $1 checks to the state’s neediest residents. It’s a plan that’s supposed to bring millions of dollars worth of food stamps to the state by March.
When you add printing and postage, it seems like a waste, but the state says the economy has them pulling out all the stops to find money wherever they can.
[. . .]
But Leo Ribas, head of community services at the Department of Social and Health Services, says there’s a method to the state’s madness.
“We’re trying to do this at a time when people need assistance the most,” said Ribas.
He says if the state’s food stamp recipients receive just $1 for energy bill assistance, that qualifies them for extra federal assistance. That means someone like Nelson could receive about $30 more per month in food stamps.
Sending out $1 checks cost the state $250,000. DSHS says that could bring the state and additional $43 million in federal funding.
If you consider it from this bureaucrat’s perspective, spending $250,000 to get $43 million is a perfectly rational thing to do. We all know about the housing bubble and the credit bubble and the dot-com bubble. How come so few are talking about the government bubble? That one will burst, too.
In the first five weeks of his presidency, Barack Obama has acted so rashly that at least 11 states have decided that his brand of “hope” equates to an intolerable expansion of the federal government’s authority over the states. These states — “Washington, New Hampshire, Arizona, Montana, Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma, California…Georgia,” South Carolina, and Texas — “have all introduced bills and resolutions” reminding Obama that the 10th Amendment protects the rights of the states, which are the rights of the people, by limting the power of the federal government. These resolutions call on Obama to “cease and desist” from his reckless government expansion and also indicate that federal laws and regulations implemented in violation of the 10th Amendment can be nullified by the states.
Both the 9th and 10th Amendments have been dead for decades. The federal government has moved so far beyond what it is permitted to do constitutionally that few people even pretend that’s a viable issue anymore.
Maybe we need full-time legislators here. While our part-time lawmakers are fooling around with silly things like a two-year budget, the wise men and women in the Illinois legislature are dealing with truly cosmic issues:
SPRINGFIELD - Like some sort of rulers of the universe, state lawmakers are considering restoring little Pluto’s planetary status, casting aside the scientific community’s 2006 decision downgrading the distant ice ball.
An Illinois Senate committee on Thursday unanimously supported planet Pluto and declaring March 13 “Pluto Day.” The idea now moves to the full Senate for a vote.
The push for a state decree on Pluto comes from state Sen. Gary Dahl, a Republican whose downstate district includes Streator, birthplace of Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh. Dahl told colleagues Pluto is important to the local community, which considers the vote to downgrade Pluto to “dwarf” planet was unfair as it involved only 4 percent of the International Astronomical Union’s 10,000 scientists.
Still to come, resolutions declaring that the moon is made of green cheese, global warming is a dangerous threat to Mars, the Sun revolves around the Earth, and God is a left-handed vegetarian. And Pi is 3.2! Oh, wait. That one was ours.
I’ve written before (can’t remember if it was here or in the paper) about the disappearance of barber shops and my ongoing struggles to keep a barber. Every time I find one, he’s already semi-retired and down to one chair. In some states, this is a result of the regulatory state, not just an unfortunate byproduct of changing times:
In the 70’s and 80’s many states merged their Barber and Cosmetology Boards into one. Suddenly a young man who could make a decent living as a Barber couldn’t do a partly paid apprenticeship, taking just months to learn a career that could serve him for life. He had to pay to attend a Community College or private tech education program that could last two years, while making him learn a variety of skills he’d never employ. And he, or she was also taught to charge much more for the service.
And that doesn’t include the regulation side, which went on to require every Barbershop to meet the standards of the largest women’s Salon in terms of specialized sinks and facilities a traditional Barber would never need.
I looked up Indiana’s rules and discovered we still have separate boards. But the interesting question is why barber shops (or beauty shops, for that matter) would be so regulated in the first place. I’ve had some really awful haircuts in my day and, guess what, the hair always grew back and hid the mistakes. Well, until lately, anyway. The rules and regulations for Indiana barbers (pdf file) go on for 40 pages. A “barber school” is required to give strudents 1,500 hours of coursework, including:
(A) the scientific fundamentals for barbering, hygiene, and
bacteriology;
(B) the histology of hair, skin, muscles, and nerves;
(C) the structure of the head, face, and neck;
(D) elementary chemistry relating to sterilization and
(F) at least ten (10) hours of study on skin and diseases of the
skin under a certified dermatologist;
Geez. Guess my mother with the bowl and scissors was guilty of at least a haircut misdemeanor.
Not to be sexist or anything, but an old-fashioned barbershop is about the last place left where guys can hang out with other guys and tell dirty jokes and talk about stuff like cars and old John Wayne movies. Just half an hour to 45 minutes once a month or so — is that too much to ask? I’m like most men of about my age who remember the rite of passage involved with going with Dad to the barbershop for the first time. Whenever I’m in a real barbershop (not the unisex places in the mall), I can close my eyes and almost hear him and the barber arguing about the Cincinnati Reds.
Sometimes I regret that my job prevents me from also serving on public boards. I have to miss out on all sorts of fun things, like being lectured by sex offenders:
A registered sex offender cautioned the Vigo County School Board about going too far with a policy aimed at keeping such offenders out of schools and off school property.
On Monday, Donald W. Hyde addressed the board regarding a proposed school policy that states: “Except in limited circumstances, Vigo County schools will not permit registered sex offenders, whose victim was a minor, to be on school property.”
[. . .]
In particular, Hyde warned the board about denying people their civil rights and their right to free speech. If the administration building is placed off limits under the policy, then those affected individuals would be denied the right to attend public school board meetings.
Indiana law prevents sex offenders from working in a school or from living within a certain distance of a school, but not from being in a school building, which would seem to be a gap in the law that the school board has a legitimate interesting in filling. On the other hand, sex offenders probably do have some questions they might want to direct to a school board. If they aren’t allowed to work in or live near a school, how else are they supposed to find out at what times the children come and go? Give a guy a break!
Looks like the long crusade to bring red-light cameras to Indiana might be on the verge of succeeding. A bill to authorize the cameras passed the Senate and now moves to the House. A survey by the AAA Hoosier Motor Club found that 94 percent of the respondents support the cameras, and even the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana says the practice is constitutional. Supporters (including many cities in Indiana, including Fort Wayne) say it’s all about safety, not revenue, but consider:
The Lafayette Police Department tested a camera for one day last year and taped 135 violators. By comparison, from January 2007 to June 2008, police issued 368 tickets to drivers running stoplights in Lafayette.
That’s more than a third as many tickets as from a year and a half issued in just one day. Even in normal times, such revenue potential would be seductive, and it’s hard to believe so many cities have a sudden extra passion for safety just when we’re in the middle of a recession.
If this passes, journalists and citizen activists should at least start paying attention to yellow caution lights at the affected intersections. Studies have shown that increasing the time of the yellow light improves safety and decreasing the time increases the number of crashes. And some cities have been accused of installing the cameras, then shortening the caution lights.
Gov. Daniels isn’t going to follow the example of some Republican governors and simply refuse at least part of the federal stimulus package:
Daniels went on to say that he didn’t want to get wrapped up in the partisan bashing of the $787 billion package, saying his job simply was to find ways to best use the money to benefit the state. Still, he said he understood the critics’ positions.
“There are some very legitimate concerns about this bill … massive concerns” said Daniels, acknowledging critics’ contentions that the package “smuggled in dubious policy” on welfare without work and health care.
Assuming everybody’s motives are pure (not always a safe assumption in politics), whether Daniels or the other governors are right depends on how long the strings are on the “gifts” to the state. In return for the short-term help, will states be obligated to change their long-term rules in ways their citizens might not like? This seems to be a matter of dispute, and I don’t know enough to make the call.
Daniels’ decision to take the money is understandable and defensible. The payback for the stimulus — in greater federal debt and higher taxes and perhaps a lot of other things, such as inflation — will be borne by Hoosiers as well as all other Americans. Refusing the money would be akin to turning down, say, a $100 loan even if you were required pay back $500 whether you took the $100 or not.
Daniels says he wants to use the money for roads and bridges and teachers, and Hoosiers need to hear a lot more details before they agree that this is what the governor calls “wise investment.” We’ve got a lot of toll-road money out there for infrastructure, so why duplicate that with the stimulus money? And what kind of spending is going to be done on teachers? One story says the plan is for “teacher preparation,” and another says it’s to make sure we can attract the best teachers; both explanations are a trifle vague. Is this money going to be spent in ways that give us longterm value without obligating us to new longterm funding? The governor has rightly criticized that possibility in other contexts.
I’m so sorry I’ve been so negative about the stimulus package. If I’d known about the brilliant strategy being considered to implement it, I’d have been on board long ago:
President Obama has turned to his own vice president to oversee implementation of the $787 billion economic stimulus package, part of which will be available this week for state Medicaid programs.
Obama announced his decision before the National Governors Association in Washington on Monday, saying Vice President Joe Biden will help ensure the distribution of the money is not just swift, “but also efficient and effective.”
“The fact that I’m asking my vice president to personally lead this effort shows how important it is for our country and future to get this right,” he said.
With Biden in charge, what can possibly go wrong? As Nick Gillespie says, “The idea of Joe Biden . . . being in charge of anything other than a card game on the Acela club car is pretty disturbing. To have overseeing the implementation of nearly $800 billion in government loot boggles the mind. It’s like Jimmy Stewart turning over his bank’s money to Uncle Billy for safekeeping in It’s a Wonderful Life.”
Is there really such a thing as “hot news” anymore?
A case between the Associated Press and All Headline News is moving forward based on a 90-year-old legal doctrine which may no longer be applicable in the Internet age. A federal judge ruled that the AP can sue AHN for stealing its “hot news.”
The AP alleges that AHN simply copies the AP’s headlines and news without permission and without paying a syndication fee, and then resells those headlines and news stories as part of its own feeds with all AP accreditation stripped out.
If that is what happened, it does sound like pure theft. But rather than simply sue AHN for copyright infringement, the AP is also invoking the “hot news” doctrine, which treat news scoops as a form of property. Hot news is defined as time-sensitive news that is gathered at a cost, which a competitor then reproduces, free-riding on the original news-gathering organization’s efforts.
Or, rather, does it stay hot long enough for its “time-sensitive” nature to really be worth anything? I frequently link (as do many others) to stories I see in other Indiana newspapers. Then AP will pick them up (as part of its contract with those papers) and distribute them to other papers, which will then print them a day or two after everybody in the blogosphere has already commented them to death.
More from the article:
But what constitutes “hot news” in an age of instant communications? And how long does it last. In 1918, “hot news” traveled by mail and telegraph. It could last hours or even days. Today, a true scoop lasts for about a minute. The AP would have to show instances of articles where not only the AP broke the news, but was the only outlet to get the original story—something rarer and rarer when anyone can publish news over the Internet.
It also raises some troubling questions. Is the AP going to start suing bloggers or news aggregators who take an AP headline and excerpt and rebroadcast it to the world, even with a proper link and attribution? And what happens when the AP is scooped by bloggers, which happens every day. Should bloggers sue the AP?
