Is my set of blogs the logical equivalent of a news
consolidation site?
You have to be familiar with my set up (look at the
home page of doaskdotell.com and Blogger profile). But persons familiar with it that I do “connect
the dots” and sometimes come up with warnings about serious problems especially
with free speech, sometimes including my own personal narratives.
I link to many stories, but I don’t copy them onto
your computer or device.
That makes this different from, say, Smartnews which
is used as an app and is ultimately paid for by advertisers. Most of my content is self-funded, with
Adsense and Amazon providing minimal revenue.
As I have noted elsewhere, some people might see that as a problem.
I have “warned” about somethings glossed over by
mainstream media – like EMP. But I
really did not see the paradigm for the novel coronavirus coming, that it could
lead to lockdowns, and to the emphasis on the “moral” problem of exposing
others to a disease you are more likely than they are to recover from easily.
Neither did anyone else (except maybe Avi Schiffmann,
who started his coronavirus tracker in Dec. 2019.
Many of the stories I link to are now behind paywalls. Some of them I do subscribe to: several
newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Los
Angeles), and a few periodicals (Atlantic, Wired, National Geographic,
Scientific American). Keeping up with
them is clumsy, and I have talked in the past about the idea of news
bundles. Some of them offer a few free
articles a month free, but fewer do now. When I give a link on a blog post, it
is likely that the reader will need a subscription to read the content in the
kink.
This is more of an issue today than it was 15 years
ago, when most sites were free. Remember
the days of footnotes, bibliographies, and trips to the public library?
Hyperlinks (even embeds) are still like footnotes
(although there is Goldman v. Breitnart, see Feb. 17, 2018). But some news sites
write warnings that their stories cannot be rewritten or reused, although the
facts that the links present cannot be owned or copyrighted.
This leads to the attempts in the EU to discourage news
linking with the “link tax” (Article 15), which may have slowed down because of
the distraction of the pandemic.
Frankly, a lot of this (along with Article 17)
reflects a belief that amateurs should not be distributing global information on
their own without gatekeepers; they should
pursue activism through solidarity. This is a view that has become popular on
the Left, of course, but also includes a lot of protectionism for legacy media
jobs, from competition from those who do it to feel important (sort of sigma
male news) but not for a living. And there is now radicalization, foreign manipulation,
and “fake news” – looping back to the recent attack on 230 (even Biden’s).
In any case, my setup is much less sustainable today
than it looked a decade ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment