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by jeremymims
4771 days ago
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This analysis is tragically incorrect. The Times legal department in no way represents the Times newsroom or the developers who made Snow Fall. Reporters and developers love tools that let them tell stories like Snow Fall more quickly and inexpensively. There is only one reason the NY Times hasn't made another story like Snow Fall in the last 5 months: It's too damn expensive and time-consuming to replicate in a one-off way. I work with hundreds of newspapers and a dozen or so have contacted me to ask how they could use Scroll Kit's technology in the past few days. In fact, one of my larger top-100 newspaper clients signed up to use Scroll Kit this week. They won't be the only ones. In case you haven't noticed, newspapers need to find new ways of making money. And they needed it yesterday. Folks trying to monetize newspapers aren't worried about someone copying their article to demonstrate a use case (hell, this event probably drove meaningful traffic to the original), they're worried that they're not going to be able to stay in business. If you were like any digital director around the country, you didn't give a shit about copyright infringement. You only salivated over all the cool things you could be making and monetizing. Since most newspapers have no way of creating a Snow Fall type of article themselves, they'll use Scroll Kit, they'll use it at scale, and they'll sell premium ad units to monetize these articles in a more effective way than normal content. From my viewpoint, that's a real positive for those of us trying to keep journalism alive. All the surrounding conversation about copyright infringement is just so completely missing the point that it might as well be arguing about the right way to polish the brass on the Titanic. |
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jeremymims said:
> I work with hundreds of newspapers and
> a dozen or so have contacted me to ask
> how they could use Scroll Kit's technology
> in the past few days. In fact,
> one of my larger top-100 newspaper clients
> signed up to use Scroll Kit this week.
> They won't be the only ones.
looks like scrollkit's gambit, as misguided as it was, actually _worked_ for them. :+)
-bowerbird
p.s. and maybe _i've_ made a mistake calling it "misguided". in one sense, sure, it was stupid to use copyrighted content from a protective source. but can anyone honestly argue that the brouhaha didn't get extra juice because it was "snow fall"? would an example based on "pride and prejudice" have garnered so much attention? yeah, right... i mean, i thought cody was a bit crazy because it seemed like he expected praise for scrollkit and he ended up with a shitstorm instead. but maybe, just maybe, he was crazy like a fox, and knew that a shitstorm was exactly what he needed right now.