Someday, when students study the twitching convulsive death of newspapers, and this very Cleveland-like episode in particular, one coincidence will jump out - that the PD’s top brass spent the entire period before, during, and after July 4, Independence Day, pimping a proposal to turn the First Amendment into their very own federally enforced cash cow of extortion just to keep their paychecks fat, and incoming.  And they quite purposefully used a Pulitzer prize winning wife of a US Senator to kick it off, pimp it, and push it for weeks.

Wherever he is, Edward R. Murrow probably just killed off a bottle of Jack Daniels by now, and is frantically asking around for something stronger.

It gets worse, of course.  Should those students decades from now dig any further into this period of time, they will also discover the PD’s simultaneous silence regarding a journalist in the PD’s own hometown, who has spent the last 3 months under assault from a sitting elected official who is also turning the First Amendment into a weapon against speech, using it to get journalists fired for reporting truth.

The hushed, stunned silence in that classroom decades from now will be deafening.

Much has been noted about the knee buckling arrogance of Ted Diadiun, Connie Schultz, the PD, and the newspaper industry itself, as they all clamor for a life raft, begging for sympathy even as they spit bile at the people holding the life preserver.  But while they whine, wheeze, and die in ever increasing spasms of dementia, media and news are regenerating at the speed of the internet, every single day.

The world these self-imporant incompetent toffs wish to stop from coming is already here, thriving, and will instantly take the place of every newspaper that dies in the coming months or years, without the slightest fanfare.  It’s all very American.

For example, this blog, BLACKHEARTCleveland, didn’t even exist three weeks ago - a period during which Connie, Diadiun, and the very top of the PD intelligentsia cooked up with their employer and their “First Amendment attorney” a frenzied display of breathtaking hubris aimed in direct assault at the First Amendment.  In those three weeks, as the PD desperately abandoned any pretense of protecting the rights by which their industry was given birth, this blog, and others, took up defense of that right, both in opposition to the PD’s laughable proposal, and in defense of a journalist who must wonder every day what it takes to get his local paper to give a fucking shit.

And we all did it for free.  On our own time.  For the sole reason that it was the right thing to do.

So fear not the end of newspapers.  They will come back someday, when they learn how to make money without extorting it from the First Amendment.  When their leadership stops acting like entitled trust fund babies pulling fat paychecks for almost no work.  When they stop selling their access and their souls.  When they jettison the worthless sagging driftwood of aging blowhards drawing absurd salaries in exchange for twice weekly opinion writing which was once the pinnacle of their “profession”, but is now just another hopelessly expensive luxury in a vast sea of opinions which are all free, all available with a single click, all more authentic, always more frequent, almost always better written, and just plain more valuable.

It’s called a free market of ideas.  What destroys the value of the product newspapers try to sell in this competitive marketplace is their own repulsive culture of self-entitlement, in all its sordid maniacal glory. If they lose that culture, and its endlessly varied putrid manifestations, newspapers will come back.  And they’ll be better newspapers, led by a new generation of journalists who remember what it once meant to be one - thanks to the lessons learned from studying the spectacular descent into oblivion this current detritus of parasites currently travel.

Until then, seeing this generation of the news industry’s corrupt and fetid walking dead disappear in a prancing flourish of self-important panic should bring us all joy, should be cheered on, accelerated, and laughed at.  Do enjoy it thoroughly, they deserve every ounce of disdainful mockery they have brought on themselves.

Because something better is on its way, and is probably already here.  You can find it right on your laptop, right now, in a matter of seconds.

That is six months from now, which is a lifetime in an industry that, in the last six months, has slashed thousands of salaries and jobs. How much more time can we waste before we’re no longer an industry worth saving?

Schultz cites a paper proposing a change in the law written by the PD’s own attorney, David Marburger, even quoting Marburger, obliquely noting the somewhat important fact that he’s on the PD’s payroll.

David Marburger is a First Amendment lawyer at Baker Hostetler who has represented newspapers, including The Plain Dealer, for nearly 30 years.

In the very same edition of the paper, Marburger is also described as on the payroll, in another story on the Sunday front page.

Attorney David Marburger, who often represents The Plain Dealer on issues involving open meetings and public records…

Let’s look at Mr. Marburger’s paper.  Largely, it’s a litany of predictable MSM whining about the internet.  His proposal, as Connie describes it.

Ideally, news originators’ stories would be available only on their Web sites for the first 24 hours.

Stop laughing, and let’s go to the rationale, then you can laugh as hard as you want.  Marburger hangs the entire 51 pages on a case from 1918.

In 1918, the United States Supreme Court affirmed an injunction barring a for- profit news wire service from competing with the Associated Press in much the same way.   The International News Service allegedly rewrote uncopyrighted AP news dispatches arriving in New York, and sold them via telegraph and telephone to newspapers in the western states.   That enabled the INS dispatches to arrive out west at about the same time that AP’s original dispatches got there. Describing INS as misappropriating AP’s “quasi-property,” the Court decided that INS was unfairly competing with AP by free-riding on AP’s substantial journalistic costs. The injunction was not permanent.   It lasted only long enough for AP to exploit the highly-perishable commercial value of its own news reports before INS could exploit their substance.  That case is International News Service v. Associated Press, 248 U.S. 215 (1918).

Marburger himself even notes later in his paper that “courts generally have treated the INS ruling as weak, unreliable precedent.”  Not weak enough for the PD!  But weak enough to be wiped out by Congress explicitly in 1976, which Marburger dutifilly notes.

When Congress revised the copyright act in 1976, it added a provision — § 301 – that abolishes all state laws that function as copyright does.    A draft of the statutory revision had preserved the INS theory so that it was not subject to the copyright act’s pre-emption of state laws.   But the Justice Department objected, exaggerating the effect of the INS decision by arguing that it gave news organizations a “boundless monopoly” in factual information of public interest that the copyright act placed in the public domain.   The House then struck the exception.

The Justice Department seemed to think in 1976 precisely as Connie Schultz did yesterday in her piece!

Marburger anticipates the rebuttal: “Newspapers want to monopolize the truth.”

Marburger, having duly gutted the First Amendment with his proposal relying on a non-precedent, then posits the miracle world in which his clients CONTROL ALL NEWS PAY ME FOR IT NOW MOTHER FUCKER.

If used strategically by newspaper publishers and others who originate news reports, our recommended change to the copyright law would pressure aggregators to contract with originators of news reports to avoid the legal consequences of unjust enrichments suits.

Marburger is not essentially, but precisely proposing a state creation of a state news agency, enforced by law, forcing every other person on earth who wants to link to that news in the first 24 hours to pay for it.

The rest of Marburger’s paper reads like an autopsy of how the internet killed newspapers’ flawed business model, not news or newspapers, before the death even happens yet.   It’s as if the PD knows how fucked they are, is predicting it, and wants Congress to pass a law to stop their business from dying.

What Marbruger proposes isn’t just offensive on its face, it’s utterly unenforcable, as Marburger himself notes.

The injunction would last for a sufficient period of time to enable the originator to exploit the brief commercial life of its news reports before the aggregator can, and thus recoup the originator’s investment in journalistic services.

The goal, however, is not to indulge those remedies.  It is to create substantial legal and economic pressure on the aggregators to compete fairly with news originators in the market for advertising revenue.  Eventually, that should lead to contracts, not lawsuits.

Get that?  Marburger admits that enforcing his new law after the fact is kinda impossible, it’s the FEAR of being sued that will FORCE the internet aggregators to enter into CONTRACTS with his CLIENT.  This is a fantasy land. If you want to see what that fantasy really looks like, here’s the full PDF, download it, put on some early Syd Barrett Pink Floyd, sit back, burn one, and enjoy the trip!

This is what happens when you’ve spent your career cloistered in some other world.  A Pulitzer prize winning columnist Connie Schultz, who happens to be married to a US Senator, openly campaigns for federal legislation designed by her employer’s attorney, whose status as such she barely notes, whose proposal relies on ancient long overturned precedent to create a federal fiat ordering people to contract with her employer so she doesn’t lose her job.  All the while urinating on the First Amendment.

You couldn’t make this up if you tried.  That cat’s something I can’t explain.

we ask for more media outlets, more alternatives to the shit we get, but when they crop up, we dont support them. sure we pick em up and put it in our bags, carry issues around but we do not support them as we should. and we dont have the money to support them without the help of advertising, and local businesses are hurting too much to use their limited resources and advertise with start-ups.

we all know the issues. we all know solutions. i just wonder what we are waiting for.

Rafeeq is right on the money.  When I first moved to Cleveland almost 6 years ago, there was a great glossy mag run by Daniel Gray-Kontar called Urban Dialect. It ended up folding rather soon after I wrote two music reviews for it. Probably my fault. That was my first brush with the ephemeral world of Cleveland indie media. The publication cycle is one of perennial sprout and wither for these grassroots, passion-filled people.

The issues are easy to enumerate. Here’re a few:

1. The Plain Dealer, Cleveland Scene and oft-forgotten stepchild Sun Newspapers aren’t doing a good enough job covering local news.
2. Other publications, like the Plain Press, don’t cover the same topical material.
3. Obtaining funding or advertising to produce the physical publication can be so time consuming that the writing suffers.
4. Finding and keeping a good depth of passionate writers is difficult, especially if you can’t pay.
5. The process takes a lot of work.

I don’t know what all the solutions are that Rafeeq alludes to, but I’ve got at least two ideas that I feel have wings.

• Collaboration & Cooperation, not Competition: The people involved in these local publications need to share content, writers and funding in order to stay afloat. These local magazines might see each other as competitors when they should be thinking of them as teammates. Anyway, sharing funding is probably the craziest idea that just might work, especially if they’re poaching each other’s advertising dollars. That’s the way publishing houses or film studios work. The big sellers make it possible for the independent, smaller run books and films to be made. The analogy doesn’t exactly cross-over into the independent media, but there’s something to be said for having independent media (if they insist on remaining a print publication) Co-Operate with each other, even if it does smack of *gasp* socialism. I derived this part from the assumption that the people writing these publications aren’t just doing it for the money.
• Cyberspace over Meatspace: You can setup a fully functional web-site for under $300 these days if you’re tech savvy. If you’re not, you’ll have to pay someone who is to get it setup for you, but the cost is negligible compared to producing an actual print publication. The only downside is that you don’t have the distribution or an actual physical object to hold and read while you’re at your 2 o’clock appointment. The website doesn’t preclude actually producing a print publication, and if you can’t afford to go print for a month, you’ve got the website to fall back on.

Here are some current independent publications that I know of:

• Messy Magazine - “an online, theme inspired publication focusing on the creative community in and around Cleveland, distributed from Cleveland. We showcase literary work, art, music, film, photography, DIY, you name it.”
• Pinkeye Arts Magazine - “covering local artists and gallery openings going on around town.”
• Faction Press/The Independent/Rust Belt Report - Ambitious, hoping to be an eventual Scene competitor/killer. First issue arrives August 5th.
  

There’s also the hyperlocal weblogs/print publications run as non-profits. It seems like someone decided to monetize the hyperlocal community weblog. None of these existed when I started Tremonter 4 years ago, but I’m glad to see that they’re around:

• Ohio City Argus - They don’t seem to be updating their site at all, but I picked up the actual physical paper the other day at Dave’s supermarket.
• Collinwood Observer - Same website design as the Argus, spun off from the Lakewood Observer.
• Heights Observer - Same deal as the previous two, only covering Cleveland/University Heights.
  

I’ve emailed whomever I can find as a contact at these publications, inviting them to come over to BHC and start a conversation.