Blogger Boycotts; Noise for “The Club” or Impactful?
Last Friday news broke that the Drudge Retort received notice from the Associated Press (AP) to discontinue citing its content because of provisions regarding “fair use” in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The story was met with protest and outrage by the blogging community which felt the AP was unfairly serving the Drudge Retort.
The two issues that drove the discussion are from opposing viewpoints. On the one side, you have the AP who wishes to change how the Drudge Retort posts and possibly pays for AP content. And on the other, the bloggers counter that the AP should consider adhering to its standards of quotation. Many bloggers, including well-known tech blogger Michael Arrington, have called on their peers to boycott the AP’s content in response to the story.
Boycott chart
*updated on June 23, 2008
I first heard about this story last week when it showed up in my Twitter stream. As the day passed, the conversation grew. It was a topic of chatter on Techmeme (an aggregator of tech news), Arrington of TechCrunch proposed a boycott and it was Dugg more than 2,000 times on Digg, another popular news aggregator. Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine (post) wrote a post about the AP and traditional media, urging them to adopt standards of citation put forth by bloggers. But did the outrage and calls to action matter? Would it impact how often the AP is cited or the behavior of millions of bloggers unaware of the issue? As of today, the answer is no, but it’s still early in this story.
AP Chart
* updated on June 23, 2008
As of the June 19th the discussion of the boycott has dropped off and the buzz is almost back to pre-Friday levels. As one can see from the AP chart there hasn’t been a large impact on AP references in the blogosphere, so the question is; what would it take for a blog boycott? Is calling for the boycott of news too much to ask for a publishing medium that is totally reliant on news? I think the answer today is yes, but we’ll have to see how this story shapes up and what happens to citing in the future.
Now if we could only get those auto-play audio banner ads boycotted…
