March 30, 2007 at 1:12 pm
Huffington’s Theory of Publishing Promiscuity
“Is it Ginger or MaryAnn?” Arianna Huffington rhetorically asks the audience at the 2007 American Society of Newspaper Editors [ASNE] Convention during a panel entitled “Lessons from the Digital Revolution.” The panel was filled with top execs and writers from the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post - and the conversation turned to Arianna’s theory of web publishing promiscuity.
“I say, let’s have a three way!” she flamboyantly declares.
Visuals aside, Huffington is addressing one of the major issues in digital publishing: whether to restrict all of one’s content to an individual website - or whether to permit cross-publishing or cross-posting.
Cross-publishing is the practice of allowing other websites to re-print the full text of your content (text, images, etc.) with full attribution to the original author/publication and a link to the original source.
Advocates believe that publishing their content on other websites exposes their work to wider audiences, and drives traffic back to their site when interested readers click to read more.
Detractors prefer to publish all of their content solely on their own site, both to build up their paper’s site as a destination, and in order to sell ads around that content.
HuffingtonPost.com co-founder Kenneth Lere echoed Huffington’s proclamation by stating that “Ubitioquity is the new exclusivity” and that is “the way we manage our business” at the HuffPo.
Perhaps predictably, Donald Graham, CEO/chairman of the Washington Post Co., is not an advocate of web publishing promiscuity, stating: “No newspaper or one site will do everything in this time, but what the Post can do that is special is to produce something that people want to come back to.”
Read Editor & Publisher’s coverage of the same session
What does this mean for alts?
The cross-publishing debate is a massive one - especially for alt-papers. On the one hand, there is the opportunity to gain new audiences through links. On the other hand, there is the potential loss of traffic-based ad revenue and loss of branding identity.
Here in the AAN offices, I had a healthy debate with a staffer about the promiscuity theory. What’s your take?
Tags: arianna huffington, ASNE, promiscuity, publishing
jon:
March 30, 2007 at 2:23 pm
In theory, cross-posting is great exposure for your story and perhaps for your paper’s brand. I say this as someone who often cross-publishes full articles for the online magazine i work on in my spare time. It’s been a great tool for us to get more exposure.
But for papers as established as AAN members, there are some sticky issues to deal with. I’ll give you a recent example that illustrates some of cross-publishing’s problems.
As editor of aan.org and altweeklies.com, I’m exposed to a lot of content by and about AAN members. As I was browsing papers’ sites, I came across http://texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=2440" rel="nofollow">this excellent article by the Texas Observer, detailing a Colonel’s suicide and the fact that his suicide note was addressed to one of his superiors, Gen. David Petraeus (currently leader of US forces in Iraq, executor of “the surge”). A great, heartbreaking story.
So I posted it to AltWeeklies.com. The author and/or the Observer staff also published the story http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/49233/ "target="_blank" rel="nofollow">on AlterNet around the same time. I can understand why —
a) it was a big story and a natural fit for their audience (which is why they used it as one of their main highlighted stories for days)
b) their web audience is much larger than the observer’s is (i don’t know this *for a fact*, but i’d be willing to bet my left leg on it)
And that’s fine and good. But as I started to see the article talked about and linked to around the web and on blogs, people weren’t saying, “Hey, check out this article by the Texas Observer,” they were saying, “Hey, check out this article by *Alternet*”
In addition, you’re letting a robust conversation about your story (in this case, 195 comments) happen on someone else’s turf. To me it’s the equivalent of having your Letters to the Editor published in your city’s daily: It just doesn’t make sense.
When that happens, the whole purpose of cross-posting (brand exposure, if you will, for your paper) flies out the window. When you did a kick-ass story, doesn’t it matter that people think *you* did it, not *someone else*?
Further, let’s take a look at the googlator: Try out “col. westhusing + suicide” and you’ll see that results #2 and #3 are the very same article. But what’s important is who’s number 2.
Granted, being second and third in google results isn’t that different — but I think you can catch my drift here.
Another problem with cross-posting has to do with web traffic, of course. I won’t get into the entire argument about it here. But I will note one other thing I observed relating to this article.
Beyond the initial cross-post, which does link back at least to the Observer’s site, further cross-posting *links back to Alternet*, letting them take advantage of the extra traffic.
Such is the case here on After Downing Street, which is arguably the go-to place for the growing number of folks interested in the impeachment of the president. (This continues to link back to Alternet despite my having asked the site’s proprietor to change the link back to the Observer, and him having said he’d do it “right away.”)
So, through all this rambling, perhaps you can see that there are definitely some things you’ve just got to think about before you cross-post.
Perhaps a good idea is to formulate some sort of arrangement that will drive more traffic (and recognition) back to your site.
Anybody worked out what they think is a good solution?
Roxanne Cooper:
March 30, 2007 at 5:17 pm
Cross-posting is a good way for Arianna to avoid paying writers.
LauraFries.com:
April 9, 2007 at 8:19 pm
I’ve been thinking about this in light of the Onion TV debut - which encourages users to repost the video content elsewhere by providing code. This strategy provides value for the Onion, which retains branding on its content, and for the advertisers, who increase their eyeballs. I don’t think the solution is as easy for print content, which can easily be stripped from its branding (newspaper name/site) and the ad content/revenue that funds its production.
[Admittedly, I’ve been thinking about the Onion a lot recently, but they have similar demographics to alt readers, and they launched both a web product and a new print product in my region…]