Media Watch

GateHouse Media sues NY Times, seeks to change the Web

Local weeklies' parent sues to stop offering links to its stories
America's largest giant company still "thinking" in last century

By Walter Brooks

"Far from being illegal or improper, this practice of linking to sites is common and is familiar to anyone who has searched the Web. It is fair and benefits both Web users and the originating site."
  - Catherine Mathis, Times Co.

The 500-newspaper media giant which owns the majority of the weekly newspapers on Cape Cod and the islands is attempting to turn the media-clock back to 1995 before the web burst onto the world scene and changed the way most Americans search for news.

The company sued the Boston Globe and its parent the New York Times yesterday to force the former to stop offering links to stories on the GateHouse sites in the Boston suburbs, specifically the Newton Tab. The practice is what we just did three times in this paragraph and has been an industry standard for almost a decade after similar suits settle the matter when the modern web browser was young.

GateHouse complained that Boston.com made the situation worse by attributing the articles to the Newton Tab and other GateHouse sources - giving readers the "false impression" that GateHouse endorsed the practice.

As their world collapses around them and they are expected by many to declare bankruptcy any day, they engage in a futile crusade to lead media back into the past.  In a statement published in The Globe today, Times Co. spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said that the company is simply doing what many other news sites already do - aggregating headlines and snippets of relevant stories published elsewhere on the Web - and that it believed GateHouse's lawsuit was without merit.

What one ex-GateHouse reporter has to say about the suit

I'm glad I don't have to try to defend this lawsuit as a reporter employed by GateHouse Media. It's going to get really, really embarrassing for a small newspaper company, and their employees are going to be ridiculed all over the newspaper business.
   Apparently the corporate owners of GateHouse Media have no idea what weblinks are, why they are valuable, or why driving traffic to a site is a good thing. Are there really people running corporations in the United States who understand so little about the Internet and how it works? Do these guys in the corporate headquarters have computers at their homes or use e-mail?
   Maybe now I understand why people at the Waynesville Daily Guide have to suffer with constantly crashing computers that are a decade old (no, I'm **NOT** kidding -- there are reasons I bought and used my own equipment whenever possible while working at the Daily Guide).
   This lawsuit deserves to get laughed out of court and treated in the same category as Adam the Apple Seller suing Sally the Shopper because Sally told other people where to find Adam's Apple Store on the web by posting a weblink... Rest the rest.

Mathis went on to say, "Far from being illegal or improper, this practice of linking to sites is common and is familiar to anyone who has searched the Web. "It is fair and benefits both Web users and the originating site." GateHouse representatives could not immediately be reached for comment.

Turning our kids into criminals

What the Globe is charged with doing is exactly what Google.com does a hundred million times each day. It is what every person who sends an email with a link or a story does routinely. It is what has become known as "fair usage."

Like the copyright laws enacted a century ago which makes every child in America a criminal when they text or email similar matter, GateHouse reasoning is inane by any standard in use in the 21st century.

The GateHouse copyright infringement lawsuit filed Monday against the parent company of The Boston Globe, claims the newspaper's new community Web sites use online material from GateHouse without permission by offering a headline and a short sentence describing the story's content and a link to the GateHouse site.

The complaint filed in the U.S. District Court in Boston claimed further that Boston.com violated copyright and trademark laws by "reproducing, displaying and distributing" its newspaper headlines and original material published on its "Wicked Local" Web sites.

Here's what The Globe's links looks like: Filene's Basement neighbor appeals renovation
The Needham Street Filene's Basement building's planned renovation is being contested by its neighbor, which filed an appeal to the Board of Aldermen last month.(Wicked Local News, 12/22/08)

Here's the same link as offered by Google:
Newton's Filene’s Basement neighbor appeals renovation - Newton ..
Dec 22, 2008 ... Newton TAB, your source for the latest breaking local news, sports, weather, business, jobs, real estate, shopping, health, travel, ...
www.wickedlocal.com/newton/news/x1647202178/Newtons-Filene-s-Basement-neighbor-appeals-renovation...

No good deed goes unpunished

In the sidebar on right you can compare what The Globe's link looks like and what the Google reference looks like, and see there is no meaningful difference between the two except the Globe's is more articulate.

The irony of ironies is that the Globe is sending GateHouse's quite modest websites tons of traffic, but their complaint seems to be that the traffic doesn't go to its homepages "where we place the ads."

The GateHouse site where the stories do go is still surrounded by the Tab's online ads, a dozen the last time we checked.

GateHouse Media (see, we did it again) owns 97 daily newspapers, 400 other publications and 260 related Web sites reaching more than 10 million people in 21 states. Its Massachusetts publications include The Provincetown Banner, The Cape Codder, The Harwich Oracle, The Register, the Sandwich Broadsider, The Bourne Courier, The Falmouth Bulletin, The Nantucket Independent, The Patriot Ledger, MPG Communications (Plymouth), The Enterprise (Brockton), the Newton Tab and the other Tab weeklies.

Rather than sue, GateHouse Media should be paying The Globe for bringing traffic to their sites.