By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
DEC. 16, 2022 | Recently reappointed Gwinnett Daily Post Publisher J.K. Murphy returned this week to Gwinnett to address the Gwinnett Rotary Club. He was there after Gwinnett Daily Post was purchased by the Times-Journal, the Marietta company that now publishes 22 newspapers in Georgia.
In his remarks, Murphy had sad news for those of you who like to have a newspaper in your hands as you read the day’s news. Newspaper readership is falling, and there are even questions if the printed newspaper, as we know it, can survive.
That’s because the majority of the country today gets its news electronically. A surprisingly large number of people read the news now….on their telephones.
Now a question for you: how many reporters do the three major electronic news sources employ? We’re talking about Amazon, Facebook (Meta) and Google, the three main platforms for electronic news.
Answer: These three sites employ no reporters. Instead, they rip off news produced by traditional news sources, and do not compensate the original source for their newsgathering at all. Not only does it seem wrong, but it also seems against the rules of business and fairness. The main companies gathering news, and paying their employees for it, is seeing its efforts used by these much larger electronic companies with no compensation whatsoever to the original source companies.
Meanwhile, these big three platforms sell advertising around that news. And in doing so, they suck up 64.4 percent of the digital advertising in the United States. Traditional media gets revenue from only 35.6 percent of digital media.
Other industries do not work that way. They pay for copyrighted material and protect the sources.
Look at how ASCAP (the American Society of Composer, Artists and Performers) protects its members. Every time a musical recording is played on any media, or sung in a nightclub, heard at a fitness center, dance hall or church, the artists gets paid a small royalty.
ASCAP puts it this way: “ASCAP seeks to pay its members based on performances of their works by the music users we license who pay us license fees. We use sophisticated technologies to monitor, track, match and process trillions of data points and seek to pay our members based on their performances fairly, accurately and efficiently.”
Seems fair. Song writers, and other artists, have a way to earn a living without some disc jockey, or TV station, or movie, ripping off their music.
The one country that has taken protecting artists as much as any country is the home of Mozart, Franz Schubert, Joseph Haydn, the Strausses, that is Austria. In that country, the counterpart to ASCAP is AKM, or “austro mechana.” Their website reads:” AKM and austro mechana represent the performing and broadcasting rights and mechanical rights, respectively, of more than 27,000 beneficiaries (“members”) in Austria and via reciprocal representation agreements with international affiliates of millions of copyright holders around the world.”
It goes deeper than you might think. The great classical artists of Austria, even in death, earn royalties for their work, which goes to support today’s Austrian artists who are writing, composing and performing music.
Austria is showing the rest of the world how it values its artistic musical talent.
Why newspaper groups don’t get together and take on the likes of Amazon, Facebook and Google, for using the newspaper’s material without compensation, we can’t imagine. Has no one suggested this before?
Meanwhile, it’s good to see J.K. Murphy’s name as a local publisher again. We welcome him and the Times-Journal family to a newspaper for Gwinnett.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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