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April 19, 2004
Blogosphere
I had an interesting conversation with an editor at a major national Canadian daily newspaper that is attempting to "ingratiate itself with the blogosphere." The idea is to run occasional posts from Canadian bloggers as a comments feature in the print edition. Sounds fine. Here is the catch: the paper does not intend to pay to publish that work. Why would it, the argument goes, when the blogger had already written the post for free? Hey, I have got an idea... I will reprint entire articles from the paper, put them up behind a paid subscription wall and sell ads along the way. I mean, I found a copy of the paper on the subway and was reading it for free anyway. So why should the owners of the paper care what I do with their work?
I happen to know what the per word rate used to be for this particular major national Canadian daily newspaper so no blogger should expect to get rich even if the paper does an about face. I have two observations to make. First, writers should be paid for their work. Second, it may be I was the first of twenty-five bloggers to ask for money from a business attempting to sell papers with my writing. But I still think this is no way to ingratiate the paper with the blogosphere.
And then... If you were one of those twenty-five you should send me an email. The traffic generated by twenty-five bloggers ads up to a newspaper. We should be selling our own ads not giving away our work to the dead tree media.
And then... Think of the following before giving away your work in exchange for a reprinted URL in the print edition of anything.
I remember the business head of MSNBC.com telling me sometime ago that Glenn Reynolds' column there gets more traffic from external blogs than from the internal promotional power of the meganewssite.
Remember, paper does not support hyperlinks.
Posted by Ghost of a flea at April 19, 2004 05:00 PM
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