When a public figure attacks journalism, reporters should see it as an opportunity to help people understand what reporters do and why they should continue to exist.

I mean, if journalists don’t defend themselves, who will? Academics? Maybe, but who cares?

And if only the marginalized and irrelevant characters are defending journalism, you have to think the profession will sink even faster than it is now.

In July, for example, Rep. Cory Gardner said on Grassroots Radio Colorado that “the media” is biased against people like him who believe in smaller government, but as far as I know, no journalist has reported why Gardner believes this, much less responded to it.

Last week, Secretary of State Scott Gessler said “a lot of the mainstream media” are “fine” with Republicans as long as they “don’t make waves.” But if Republicans, presumably like Gessler himself,  “challenge the status quo,” then then the media get upset.

Here’s a chance for journalists to explain 1) whether they’ve been “upset” at Gessler, and 2) why their coverage of him has been in the public interest.

But no such stories have been written, even though Gessler’s attack on the media appeared in The Denver Post’s Spot blog.

Then over the weekend, The Post served up a story about Gerry Whitman lashing out at the media during a farewell news conference, saying the news media’s portrayal of his department was “just ridiculous” and stories about excessive force have been overblown.

Another opportunity for journalists to stand up for themselves! But I noticed little or no such self defense in the article.

So I emailed Post reporter Kirk Mitchell, who wrote the Whitman article, and told him that when a public official attacks the media, I think reporters should treat the accusation as they would in any other news story, and present readers with a response from the entity that’s attacked.

Why didn’t he offer a quotation from a Post editor or another journalist about whether the media’s police coverage was fair.

He wrote back, “The story did mention that there were 10 police firings since March.”

True, that’s indeed a response, but let’s face it. It’s weak (and it was left out of the online edition). Here’s the graf Mitchell refers to:

[Whitman's] comments came during a year in which 10 of his officers have been fired since March, six after lying about excessive-force complaints.

The Post could have fired back at Whitman with more force, if not excessive force. An editor might have blasted him with something like:

It’s a newspaper’s job to inform the public about lying and violent-happy cops, especially when they get fired. That’s why we’re here. That’s how journalism holds public officials accountable. Rather than attacking us, Whitman might advise his own police force to behave better under the next chief, so that the Police Department’s problems won’t be in the newspaper. Until then, we’ll continue to give our readers the truth, to the best of our ability.

You probably won’t see anything like this in The Denver Post anytime soon, though I’m glad to see Post Editor Greg Moore defending the newspaper’s coverage more often on high-profile stories, including his newspaper’s handling of Mayor Michael Hancock’s alleged use of prostitutes and Scott McInnis’ non-use of a plagiarism checker.

You’re more likely to find outfits like “Fair and Balanced” Fox News get self rightious about what it does, even though it’s far less likely to be fair and accurate than the mainstream media in Denver.

Unfortunately, it seems that the more serious the news outlet, the less likely it is to get mad and defend itself, as if this is beneath it or something.

My advice is, fight back, while you still can.

Ironically, when you go to The Denver Post’s website and look for a way to pay for the content, instead of lapping it up for free, you have to get out your microscope and look in the upper right hand corner (and the way bottom of the page) to find the word “subscribe.”

I’ll make it easy by providing the subscription link here.

The Post should enlarge its “subscribe” button so its squinting aged readers don’t have another excuse, as if they need one, not to subscribe to the newspaper, which  is downsizing its newsroom once again.

Obviously The Post, like other outfits that try to practice serious journalism, is hurting. You might think it’s their own fault. You might think they’re doomed. You might think they don’t add as much to civic debate as they used to. And you might be right, but please think about subscribing anyway, especially if you use the content, to try to help keep the state’s best journalistic organ alive.

It may already be in the death spiral, but there’s still hope that if the newspaper industry can make it through the recession and, at the same time, get better at making money online, it can maintain the expertise and staff needed to inform us idiots out here.

The people who say that The Denver Post is useless at this point can’t be reading the newspaper.

If everyone in Colorado actaully read The Post, we’d have the most informed and educated state in history. I know the newspaper sucks compared to what it was, but think about how bad it could be, and how much worse the state would be without it.

The newspaper still covers the grind of politics and civic life, entertainment, business, even sports, unlike anything we’ve got and will probably ever have.

So do us all a favor and subscribe.

I had a hard time believing it, when the Denver Daily News closed back in June.

The free daily seemed to be growing and doing well.  I was thinking its chances of survival were greater than The Denver Post’s.

Then it was gone, with no real explanation of why it bit the dust so suddenly.

Westword’s Michael Roberts interviewed Denver Daily News publisher Kristie Hannon at the time, and she told him that, in terms of profit, the newspaper “had seen ups and downs.” Hannon told Roberts and other media outlets, it didn’t look like the Denver Daily News was sustainable.

I wondered why. Was it in the black? Was it really headed off a cliff before long?

You might ask, who cares? The paper had about 25,000 readers, 20 people on the payroll, and just three workhorses in the editorial department.

But, still, the Denver Daily News, usually ran daily stories about local politics, at a time when this type of content is in shorter and shorter supply.

When you think about it, on a daily basis, the Daily News was easily among the top ten media outlets in the entire state, if not the top five or so, covering the legislative session. Correct me if I’m wrong, please.

So it would be nice to know whether the DDN model, of a free print daily, mostly with original and wire-service coverage of news and sports, is anything close to viable in Denver.

Michael Roberts tried to get at this question in his interview with Hannon back in June, when the newspaper closed:

WW: Is there still a market for a print publication like the Denver Daily News? Or are such projects cost-prohibitive in today’s market?

KH: I know the price of print just increased again last week, and I don’t know if there is an end in sight for that. Competing against the Internet in that regard (print costs) is tough, but I believe ROI in this print format is far higher than most other mediums when you really do the math. As far as profitability, it’s tough to make a buck.

It was tough, it turns out, but possible.

I asked Hannon this month to talk to me more about why the DDN closed, and she agreed with me that it was worth clarifying that her newspaper was in the black when it closed, and she thinks a DDN type of newspaper could succeed.

“There were months that we lost money, but it wasn’t significant because other months would make up for it,” Hannon told me. 

The newspaper was treading water in a tough economy, and Hannon was done. She declined to say whether she and owner, Jim Pavelich, who owns the Palo Alto Post, tried to sell the Denver Daily News before shuttering it. (Pavelich, who’s developed successful newspapers but has been accused by former employees of not caring much for journalism, closed the Vail Mountaineer the same day.)

“You get to a certain stage,” Hannon told me, “and you say, does this make sense? As a business model, and personally? I was running myself into the ground.”

Hannon may have been running out of steam, but at least her editorial staff wasn’t.

“That’s the nature of the business,” said Tad Rickman, former Denver Daily News’ Editor, who often worked from dawn till dark during his decade at the newspaper. “I didn’t mind putting the hours into it.”

He says the long hours were about the same at the Lafayette News, which he left in 2001. He’s currently looking for work.

Hannon says that even though the paper ran on cash and was in the black, the future looked bad, especially with print costs rising.

“It was swimming upstream,” she told me. “We didn’t see the growth component.”

“The future always looks bad,” said Peter Marcus, the former assistant editor of the Denver Daily News, who’s now freelancing for the Colorado Statesman. “The future never looked good for that newspaper. For a decade they were beating the odds. They were doing it. But it sounds like they didn’t want to put up a fight.”

Like Hannon and Rickman, Marcus is happy to have worked at Denver Daily News, and he doesn’t fault the owner for selling the newspaper.

But he thinks management should have, among other things, given the staff notice of the closure and published a final issue, as a show of respect. As it was, the newspaper was shut down with no notice at all, he says, not even a news release on the day of the shuttering.

“They didn’t even archive the stories,” he points out. “ The website exists, but it’s blank. For some reason they decided to delete the entire legacy of the Denver Daily News. To me, that’s the epitome of the disrespect.  They don’t care that the stories have disappeared. But for us, it matters.”

That’s undoubtedly part of the reason the Denver Daily News survived for 10 years and maybe why someone will give it another shot someday.

Here’s a sentence you don’t see much these days:  A new newspaper will hit the streets Thursday.

Erin Chavez, former Associate Publisher Vail Mountaineer, which closed in June along with the Denver Daily News, will launch a weekly called “Sneak Peak Vail.”

Chavez told me she saw a hole in the advertising market after the Mountaineer closed, and she developed a business model to meet the demand and make a new newspaper sustainable.

“We’re partnering with core businesses that had supported the Vail Mountaineer,” she says. “We offered them a preferred advertising rate that provides a base for us and stable and inexpensive advertising source for them for years to come.”

After the Mountaineer shut down, Chavez said that local businesses told her that if they had an affordable and guaranteed advertising rate, they’d sign a longer term contract.

She’s got 27 contracts as of Monday, which, she says, is enough cover the main cost of printing the newspaper. She figures she can offer the reduced rate to a limited number of advertisers before her business will lose money.

The advertisers will have no input on the paper’s editorial content, which will be “more lifestyle-oriented, not based on news in the Vail valley, but more of what is going on and applying it to second home owners and locals,” she said.

Chavez has hired seven staffers and seems excited to give the business model a shot. “I’ve been lucky to have the resources up here to try this,” she said.

She said of the Mountaineer, “The model wasn’t unsuccessful. On paper it makes sense. But when the economy is hurting, and people aren’t paying, cash flow is a big problem.”

She’s hoping her new model, with ongoing support from advertisers, will fix that problem.

It’s worth saying again, given that about 30,000 newspaper layoffs have occurred in the past three years, how much a community loses when a veteran journalist loses her job.

For example, someone like me has to spend hours poring over Nexis to discover that former Gov. Dick Lamm and former GOP chair Bo Callaway secretly agreed in 1980 that Colorado should have competitive congressional districts.

But Post reporter Lynn Bartels simply has to check her brain, not Nexis. She was a Rocky reporter when it published the story back in the year 2000. After having asserted that Bartels failed to report the Lamm/Callaway story Friday, I regret to report today that, in fact, Bartels wrote a piece about it in December.

“I didn’t need to pore over LexisNexis,” Bartels points out. “I worked with Michele Ames and read her story at the time.”

And not only that, she quoted the current Colorado GOP chair, Dick Wadhams, openly saying he supports competitive districts, like Callaway did scretly:

“I think you get better elected officials that way, but I’ve never figured out how we get there,” [Wadhams] said. “You’d have to split El Paso County and Denver County, and I’m not sure either side would go for that.”

So my assertion that The Post, and other local media, had not reported what Colorado Republicans think about competitive districts was also wrong.

We’re fortunate we’ve still got Bartels and other veteran journalists in town. I wish we had more.

I’m a volunteer blogger for the Huffington Post.

I’m paid to write elsewhere, but I submit my work to Huffpo for free to push out my writing.

HuffPo relies on volunteers. It has a core staff of about 150 paid journalists, but much of the site’s content comes from volunteers like me, for free.

But some of the volunteers aren’t happy. Last month, a group of them told Arianna Huffington that they want to be paid, or at least talk about being paid.

Their demand came after AOL purchased the Huffington Post for $315 million.

These bloggers called on the rest of HuffPo’s volunteer bloggers to stop submitting their work.

They asked bloggers like me not to cross their “virtual picket line.” In other words, they asked me to stop volunteering.

The virtual picket-line organizers didn’t ask volunteer writers who submit content to other blogs and online publications to stop submitting their writing to those outlets too. Just Huffpo.

But others could have been targeted, like Yourhub.com or even ColoradoPols.com. One way “new media” entities are surviving, whether they make money or not, is to solicit content, like articles, photos, and columns, from you, the public.

Sometimes this work is edited, as it is cursorily on Huffpo, and sometimes it’s not, as you can see on many blogs that happily accept some of the worst and most vitriolic commentaries you can imagine. (A bad combination, I know, but it works for some blogs.)

The question raised by Huffpo strike is, if an online entity makes money, should it share some of that revenue with its volunteer writers?

Well, many volunteers would love to be paid, but you have to think they’re happy to give up their time freely, seeing as how they’re volunteers, as a Huffington Post spokesman pointed out in a response to the strike.  Look at all the volunteers for the United Way, whose staff makes decent money. Or for political campaigns.

In fact, it sounds crazy for volunteers to demand payment and call a strike, especially if the volunteers didn’t first organize their fellow volunteers, take a vote, and then collectively demand wages.

I certainly thought so, after first not knowing what to think.  Then I found out that the virtual picket line at the Huffington Post was endorsed by the Newspaper Guild, the union that represents journalists nationwide. It’s a union I respect a lot.

Why would it support a “strike” like this?

“We think we’re in a critical phase of reinvention in journalism,” Guild President Bernie Lunzer told me. “We want to tackle the question of the value of our work before there’s an assumption that writers take a vow of poverty to do their craft. It really has more to do with a critical moment than anything. That’s really the point of this.”

It’s a desperate time for journalism, as big-city newspapers bleed jobs and revenue, serious news outlets offer more mayhem and fluff, and a model to support journalism on the web has not materialized.

Journalism is dying and few people seem to care. Even fewer are doing anything about it.

So, yes, you can make a case that the Huffington Post, with its influx of AOL money, should hire more journalists and pay more of its contributors.

And you can also make a really good case that Arianna Huffington herself should meet with the organizers of the virtual picket line. That’s one of their central goals. But she has refused, Lunzer told me. Most recently she called a class action lawsuit filed filed by bloggers “frivolous.”  The suit demands a cut of the AOL money.

Huffington’s bunker-style response made me want to join the bloggers and support their cause. I thought about not posting anything for a month as a symbolic show of support for the Newspaper Guild and for paid journalism.

But I couldn’t convince myself that my volunteerism was in fact hurting journalism.

The Huffington Post isn’t the problem. In fact, a hybrid of professional journalists and volunteer writers may be part of the solution. I mean, Huffpo has a staff of professional journalists, and appears to have a bright future, while other for-profit journalistic outfits are in free fall.

Still, it’s true that writers need not only a platform–but cash as well.

I hope Arianna Huffington gets the message. I hope Republicans attacking National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting get the message. I hope anyone who hires a freelance writer gets the message.

A version of this blog post was distributed last week by the OtherWords syndicate.

Follow Jason Salzman on Twitter @BigMediaBlog

There’s a feast raging on the Internet. Websites and bloggers are helping themselves to huge servings of whatever newspapers offer online.

People who run content-starved outlets steal articles from newspapers’ websites and post them on their own sites, without payment.

Who cares, you might say. Most newspapers post all their articles on their websites, free for anyone to read, whether they’ve got a subscription or not.

But many newspapers definitely care, because they make money when people visit their websites to read articles. Web advertisements are an increasingly important part of newspapers’ shrinking revenue stream.

When an entire article is copied from a newspaper’s website and posted on another website, fewer people go to the newspaper’s website to view the original article, and the paper makes less money.

Some newspapers are trying to protect their articles from being stolen. They’re trying to develop clearer “fair-use” policies, specifying for example how much of an article can be copied by a blog or website without violating the newspaper’s copyright.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal has gone further. Its parent company, Stephens Media, has helped grubstake a law firm called Righthaven, which is suing Internet entities that post articles from the paper without proper authorization.

Righthaven buys the copyright to a specific newspaper article and then sues the website or blog that posts all or even part of it, typically for $150,000 and the rights to the domain name of website that allegedly commits the offense. Most of the approximately 200 lawsuits filed against organizations, ranging from the Democratic Party of Nevada to GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle, have been settled out of court.

In December, on behalf of MediaNews, owner of The Denver Post, Righthaven sued the Drudge Report for allegedly publishing The Post’s content in violation of copyright law.

Critics, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, say Righthaven is abusing copyright law by buying copyrights to articles it will never use and by demanding excessive damages, particularly from small-time bloggers who can’t afford to defend themselves.

Critics also don’t like Righthaven’s tactic of filing lawsuits without sending a warning letter first. These warnings, referred to as “takedown” or “cease-and-desist” letters, would give a website owner the chance to remove the offending content to avoid a lawsuit.

Courts in Nevada are sorting out the complexities of whether a website’s copying of a newspaper article–even if it’s used in its entirety and deprives a newspaper of potential revenue–can be justified under “fair-use” doctrine. Critics say the doctrine is more complicated than the Righthaven legal briefs would have you believe.

These critics have a point, but in the bigger picture, the newspaper industry’s cause is just.

The Righthaven approach, imperfect as it is, gets to the heart of one of the most important questions in journalism: How do newspapers protect online content?

Organizations shouldn’t post entire news stories on their websites, and bloggers shouldn’t reproduce newspaper articles in their online diaries.

Here’s why: News articles are written by journalists, who need to be paid. And most of their salaries come from advertisements. (There are exceptions of course, including OtherWords, the non-profit editorial service that happens to be distributing my op-ed to newspapers and new media.)

Newspapers’ advertising revenue has tanked in recent years. For journalism to survive, newspaper websites must sell more ads.

The routine looting and scattering of a publication’s website content across the blogosphere, where newspapers have no prayer reaping any profit, amounts to one more nail in the coffin of journalism. Advertising dollars will then flow to any online outfit that posts stolen news stories.

That’s not only unfair, but it’s bad for our democracy. We need journalists to play a watchdog role now more than ever.

Sure, Righthaven is unseemly in the way it’s suing people, including “little” people. But if you have a better idea on how newspapers should safeguard their online content, lay it on me.

A former media critic for the Rocky Mountain News, Jason Salzman is board chair of Rocky Mountain Media Watch and author of Making the News: A Guide for Activists and Nonprofits. www.bigmedia.org

This column was originally distributed by the OtherWords syndicate.

UPDATE: This post was corrected Dec. 16 after a reader pointed out that Stephens Media, which is connected to Righthaven, does not own the Las Vegas Sun, which has been reporting extensively on the Righthaven lawsuits. Since March, Righthaven has been suing entities that post content from Las Vegas Review-Journal, not the Las Vegas Sun. But the Review-Journal, like the Denver Post, did not report a peep about this, until September, when it published a story about Righthaven suing Senate candidate Sharron Angle for alleged illegal use of Review-Journal articles.  The Review Journal ran a second article last week when Righthaven began suing to stop alleged illegal use of Denver Post content. Last week, the Review-Journal ran this and this blog post. Still nothing in The Denver Post on this topic. I’m sorry for my error.

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You may have heard about a Las Vegas law firm, called Righthaven, that’s buying the copyright to Denver Post content that is allegedly being used illegally, in violation of The Post’s fair-use policy, and then suing the alleged violators, typically for $150,000 plus the rights to the offender’s domain name.

Or, more likely, you haven’t heard about the firm, because shamefully, as far as I can tell, neither it nor its activities have been mentioned at all in The Post. (Please correct me if I’m wrong here.)

But the legal strategy to stop alleged copyright infringement has been comprehensively reported in Las Vegas Sun, and locally Westword picked it up, as did The Colordo Independent, among others.

On Monday, The Denver Daily News weighed in with the most comprehensive local coverage so far, interviewing the co-founder of Righthaven as well as representatives of some of the blogs and websites that have been sued. Righthaven, with the apparent blessing of The Post, is suing entities large (Drudge Report) and small (lowcountry912.wordpress.com).

I’m glad The Post is trying to protect its content, because I don’t buy the argument, nicely summarized today in the Sun, that newspapers are giving away their articles on their websites for free to anyone who wants them.

Still, you have to wonder about the Righthaven approach when you read a quote like this, in the Denver Daily News piece, from Steven Gibson, founder of Righthaven and reflecting comments he’s made elsewhere:

“It does not appear that an approach to addressing the infringement of copyrights that is based upon merely sending out takedown letters is a very effective way of dealing with that issue,” said Gibson. “There are literally millions, if not billions of infringements out there.”

“If a newspaper were to add the requisite staff to identify the infringements, to properly identify the infringers, and spend the time drafting appropriately worded letters, and kindly ask each one of those infringers to stop infringing, it would cost a newspaper an unmanageable amount of money to do that,” continued Gibson.

So Righthaven is suing without warning.

I called Righthaven founder Gibson, and he confirmed cease-and-desist letters are not sent because they do not work and the process is too expensive. He said:

Gibson: Think about it a minute, Jason. You are managing a newspaper’s legal department, and you have to go to management to say I need to fund the effort to staff enough people who will have notice of an infringement, then do due diligence to make sure you’re sending the letter to the right place, and then draft an appropriate letter, and follow up to make sure that the infringer received the letter because more likely than not you might not receive a response. How long do you wait in order to receive a response? That’s a lot more than one minute.

Then let’s assume that the receiver [of the letter] takes down their infringement, and says you take it down if you don’t sue me. And let’s assume there are tens of thousands of infringements out there.  And how long does it take you to develop a story? And how much are you being compensated? The newspapers are already financially strapped, and adding the capacity to write people gentle letter to say would you please take down the infringement.

And the other thing is that then the other people who know you are doing it say, ok well, they have another 9,999 letters to go before they get to me, and if all they are going to do is send me a letter saying take it down then there is no real risk to me for posting the infringing content. All they are going to do is ask me to take it down. So, you know, whoop-tee-doo, I’ll just post the infringing content and see if they ever get around to writing me a letter.

Well, our experience here in Colorado shows Gibson to be wrong about the deterrent effect of a takedown letter. One measly letter was sent to ColoradoPols, and now you rarely see any of the Post’s content in Pols, and there’s been nothing close to a violation of The Post’s fair-use policy since the letter was sent.

But Gibson has a point, no doubt, that the prospect of a no-warning lawsuit is much more frightening  than the prospect of receiving a takedown letter. I am ashamed to admit to having used copyrighted content in past lives knowing that a cease-and-desist letter would probably arrive before a lawsuit. Had I expected a lawsuit first, I may not have done broken the law.

He’s less convincing about the resources required to send warning letters. I mean, interns could do it. It just doesn’t seem that complicated to me, even if it takes a little longer than you might think at first blush. In any case, the fact that Righthaven has reportedly taken in a quarter million dollars from these lawsuits makes you wonder if there’s a better way to fund copyright enforcement.

Actually, I’m hoping that the no-warning lawsuits are part of an initial PR strategy that will be abandoned once the word gets out that newspapers are serius about protecting their content. 

I thanked Gibson for making himself available to me, and I asked if this was part of a PR strategy to let scare the world to stop stealing content. He denied this, saying:

I believe that Righthaven is going to ultimately be recognized as doing the right thing. Money is not everything. And we believe that we are advancing a social purpose, independent of whether there is a deterrent value. We believe that protecting the ownership interest in copyright is an appropriate thing to do and is forward looking, irrespective of the deterrent. And while we are running a for-profit business, we like to believe that the propriety of Righthaven’s approach will be proven over time, as issues are more fully addressed by the courts, in both Righthaven cases and otherwise that we will create a greater and broader understanding. That’s why I try to make myself available to member of the press….

Let’s go back to the basics. Copyright law is in the Constitution. It comes from the Constitution where our forefathers said, we’re going to protect inventors and artists, effectively. It’s important that at the very founding years of our country that we are going to advance the protection of the people who engage in the creative capacity, such as you. You’re going to write this article, and people should respect that. And so all of these folks out there saying, we’re attacking people, that’s very strange.

Gibson goes further:

Jason: I just think in the spirit of public discourse, which actually a newspaper tries to promote, you try to solve things without this kind of harsh—

Gibson: What’s harsh?

Jason: Filing a lawsuit when you could send a letter first.

Gibson: First of all, that presupposes that that’s harsh…-who is it harsh on? You don’t factor in the fact that we have $350 filing fees, we have $100 more of service and process fees on these defendants. So, you know, the plaintiff in these cases, Righthaven, has to expend hundreds of dollars, and arguably thousands of dollars, there are copyright registration fees and application fees. We put our money where our mouth is, if you will. This isn’t easy or inexpensive.

And, again, the question is have takedown letters succeeded in addressing the infringements. Can anyone argue in all of these blogospheres that the takedown approach will ever be successful in stemming the tide in infringement?

Jason, here’s a fantastic story for you, because your approach to this has been a bit more balanced and objective and you’re generally asking some good questions. Think about the future of the American economy. Think about 20 or 30 years from now. Think about the evolution of the American economy. Think about where value is going to be created in the future. And that is, more likely than not, our society to continue to advance, and the creation of intangible assets, content, will continue to be much more important in the future. You follow me?

Jason: Hmm mmm.

Gibson: And we continue to migrate from a post-industrial economy, whereby a vast part of the American economy is the management of information and the development of content. If you think it’s important today, look at how important it is going to be decades from now. And as such, isn’t Righthaven recognizing today what is going to be readily apparent 20 to 30 years from now, and that is, when a good part of our economy is relying on people respecting that which drives our economy, i.e., the creation of intangible assets in the information economy.

So what to do if you’re in The Post’s shoes?

Obviously, the Post should milk the PR value of this exercise by having their execs talk about it! Explain to the masses why you’re trying to protect your stories, and give people the basics about fair use.

The Las Vegas Sun is reporting on it extensively. But the Las Vegas Review-Journal, whose parent company is associated with Righthaven, has only published two articles, as far as I can tell and at least one blog post. (See the Update above.) The Post should start reporting and commenting on the Righthaven lawsuits.

The Post should take responsibility for its own lawsuits, and divulge its apparent relationship with Righthaven. Righthaven is actually kind of like one of those 527 political groups, acting “secretly” for the newspaper. And the Post’s editorial page seems to hate 527s.

The Post should also instruct Righthaven to go after the larger entities first, the ones who are more likely to know better. That’s basic kindness.

And also, The Post should insist that for every no-warning lawsuit that’s filed by Righthaven, ten cease-and-desist letters are put in the mail. This approach is more humane, while recognizing the real-life deterrent value of the no-warning lawsuit. How much time could it possibly take to write boiler-plate warning letters to copyright violators and track the responses.

In any case, if the current approach by Righthaven continues indefinitely, The Post will look seriously bad, and it looks pretty bad already, which is unfortunate because in the big picture, its cause is just.

Here’s an exchange on Colorado Pols about The Denver Post’s decision to threaten legal action against Pols:

Jason Salzman:  free content

You can understand why The Post would want to try to protect its news content, even if it’s being offered for free.

Dear Denver Post –

Don’t mess with us, because you’re irrelevant, and getting more so by the day.

So you can take your bizarre threat to sue us if we quote any Denver Post article and wrap a dead editor in it.

We won’t quote your articles. We won’t link to your articles. And it won’t matter, as far as we’re concerned. There’s plenty of other news out there for us to discuss, much of it duplicating what The Post reports. We’ll continue to get our 617,661 page views each month without you.

But, please understand that by attacking us like you’ve done you’re actually digging your own grave–and we’ll help push you there by never linking to your little articles–even though you’re happy to let us link to you, you hypocrite.

Thanks, and good luck.

Colorado Pols

That’s a summary of a letter from Colorado Pols, the great Colorado political blog, to a letter from The Denver Post and other media companies asking Pols to stop quoting news articles or face a lawsuit. The Post letter claimed that any unauthorized quotation by Pols amounted to theft.

In its response, Pols claims that The Post never really tried to work things out–before dropping the legal bomb. That’s a shame for The Post, which needs web traffic and buzz from Pols, and for Pols’ readers, who won’t have the convenience of a quick click to a Post article. That’s an inconvenience that could add up because The Post is still the biggest journalism game in the state by far, reporting lots of political news that’s not found anywhere else.

How great would it have been if somehow, some way The Post (old media) and Pols (new media) could have announced today a deal to support each other. And maybe this could have served as a national model. Maybe such a deal could have been struck.

But instead, the battle lines are drawn, despite the “respect” that Pols rightfully has for “print newsrooms,” as acknoledged in its letter. As it is, Pols’ response could serve as a national model for how blogs will battle cranky old media, like The Post.

The Pols letter is a must-read for journalism observers. It’s funny and spot-on for the most part, but like a good blog, it goes over the top as well.

Anyway, it’s a sad day for journalism in Denver, but it probably won’t matter in one, two, three years from now, when the political reporting at The Post will probably be much much weaker than it is today, if it exists at all.