Online Journalism News

'Nobody "owns" news – we were never meant to'

This comment originally appeared on Bristol24-7, the recently launched news site for Bristol.

Chris Brown is editor of the site - read Journalism.co.uk's interview with him at this link.

Who owns information? It's been the issue at the forefront of my mind during the first week of my website, which started with uniformly positive emails from people - apart from one from the Evening Post.

In a nutshell, it insisted that I could not rewrite its content and publish it on my site, even with a credit in the first paragraph and a link back to the original source on its website. A particularly amusing complaint considering newspapers up and down the country have passed off rewrites as their own for years.

My reply to them was that if they really felt they had no need of free publicity from sites such as mine, which aims to provide people with a full range of news from ALL sources, then that was fine. I would in future take their own stories on myself, adding new angles and better balance of the issues, but would have no obligation to credit them as the original source. The fact is though that I will continue to do that anyway, because I feel it is more honest and gives readers the chance to decide for themselves on the validity of what they are being presented.

Their attitude was not surprising, but goes to the heart of why the business of producing news is suffering so much in the internet age. My opinion is: you cannot 'own' news.

Before the internet, news could only be spread to a large number of people quickly via newspapers, radio and TV. Media that required large financial resources for the material, physical items needed for production - in terms of newspapers this meant printing presses, vehicles to transport the product, large premises etc.

And because of the huge costs which rose year on year, there was no chance for the individual to produce and spread news. But that has, of course, all changed.

On Wednesday, I went to listen to Chris Anderson from Wired magazine in the US speak at a Festival of Ideas evening at @Bristol. The main point I took was that in the old economy of producing 'stuff' - material goods - the costs inevitably rose year on year. But in the digital age the same pattern is repeating in reverse, the cost of producing digital material and content is falling year on year.

What this means for journalists - and the people who still, I believe, want to read the news of what is happening in their community - is that the ability and costs to spread this news is falling closer and closer to zero. And this takes the power of 'ownership' out of the hands of traditional news suppliers. We do not have to rely on them to find out what is happening in our city.

That is how it should be. News was never meant to be owned in a democracy. It is about what happens to us and the people around us. And we are free to share it as far and wide as we can.

What does that mean for Bristol24-7 and news provision in the future? I think the ones who will prosper in the 21st century are not those who try to own news. People are moving in their thousands to the internet to find out what is going on.

It will be websites such as mine that try to become a news 'hub' - whereby it becomes the starting point for people to find out what is happening through original material (that will of course be free for people to share) and links (or at least credits) to the best content elsewhere - that will generate readers and succeed.

Those that hide behind ownership and even try to charge people for that content will inevitably fail as people move quickly to the other free sources.

And the trick to make a viable business for publishers is to work with the technology that we use each minute to spread the news, to use it to help businesses, organisations, community groups and individuals spread their message and get it to the people they want to talk to.

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hyperlocal | chris brown | bristol 247 |

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