Who Owns the News? by Will Slauter

Author:Will Slauter [Slauter, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2018-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Press Associations and the Quest for Exclusivity in the United States

EFFORTS TO CREATE a special copyright law for news in the United States did not begin until the 1880s, almost fifty years later than in Britain. The circumstances and rationale were very different. In Britain, the reduction and repeal of the stamp duty motivated the first efforts to secure copyright for news. American newspapers had never been taxed, and their distribution through the mail had long been subsidized, a policy that encouraged copying. Although editors expressed interest in receiving “credit” for copied news and sometimes retaliated against those who did not provide proper credit, they did not seek legal protection. Instead, they argued for shared protocols of citation and acknowledgment that would allow news to circulate while boosting the reputations of the most enterprising newspapers. The spread of the telegraph beginning in the mid-1840s made the exchange system more problematic. Due in part to the high cost of telegraph transmission, complaints about misattribution and failure to credit became more frequent, and copying was increasingly described as “stealing.” But most editors continued to suggest that copying was acceptable as long as credit was given.

Interest in receiving credit and the expense of telegraph transmission were not by themselves enough to make newspapers seek copyright protection. Instead, the quest for exclusivity was motivated by a gradual but fundamental shift in relationships among newspapers. Beginning around 1850, the networks of editors and contributors that had characterized newspapers in the early nineteenth century gave way to more formal business arrangements. These included both cooperative associations, in which members spread the cost of collecting news among themselves, and for-profit agencies that treated newspapers as paying clients.1 Even among equal members of a cooperative association, exchange functioned differently than it had in earlier periods. Instead of exchanging news after publication, in which case credit for having first published the news might be sufficient, press associations exchanged news before publication. Members of the association sent the local news collected by their staff to a central agent, who selected and aggregated reports into a consolidated dispatch that was sent back to members for publication. Over time, the dispatches came to include foreign news obtained through contracts with agencies abroad as well as reports prepared by the association’s own staff. For these cooperative arrangements to work, press associations had to develop rules to ensure that members did not leak their local news to outside parties before it could be published by other members. They also had to stop rival agencies from taking news collected by their members and selling it to newspapers that competed for readers and advertisers in the same city. The growing emphasis on using breaking news to attract readers and advertisers and the particular cooperative arrangements that publishers created to collect and distribute this news generated a desire for exclusivity.2

The fact that the US Congress allowed the telegraph to develop through private enterprise rather than to be run as a branch of the post office (as was the case in Britain after 1870) was an important factor.

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