Boston Globe Blog Lawsuit: What a Throwback

Ok, it’s like 1999 again. Or so thinks the hyprocritical folks at Gatehouse Media, who have sued the New York Times, parent company of The Boston Globe. The reason: The Globe had the audacity to link to stories from GateHouse Media newspapers on their local web pages. Wrote the Globe’s Robert Weisman:

At the heart of the complaint, lodged by GateHouse Media Inc., which publishes 125 community newspapers in Massachusetts, is the question of whether Internet news providers will be able to continue the practice of posting headlines and lead sentences from stories they link to on other sites….A response filed Jan. 14 by Times Co. listed a string of counterclaims and noted that GateHouse’s websites similarly have used and linked to content from the Globe, The New York Times, and other news sites.

Years ago I worked at The Patriot Ledger,  which has since become a Gatehouse property and it hasn’t been pretty watching it decline the past few years. I’m a subscriber to both papers. I can tell you that the Ledger, which used to be quite a feeder paper to the Globe, is now a nice photo journal. Their “redesign” launched last year was just a simpler way of putting in larger pictures and headlines and less news hole. 

Frankly, it pains me to say I’m not sure they’ll be around in a year. Could be the next Portland-Press Herald. Yet I know where the Ledger executives are coming from: The Old Media paradigm. It used to be that when you became a member of the Associated Press, you could stipulate that certain competitive newspapers in your region did not have rights to re-publish your content. But that was then.

The New York Times and The Washington Post have since embraced the merits of link journalism instead of continuing to fight the Internet and social media.

Here’s hoping the judge see this as the regional spat it is and throws the case out. Google already fought this battle about rendering headlines and blurbs and won in the U.S.