My Pre-Twitter Warmup

In an echo from a topic we discussed in class a few weeks ago, the Journal Inquirer has now sued the Hartford Courant.  Here is the JI article, and here is the initial Courant story.

I do have to give the JI credit for being internally awake enough to give itself the story, and not get scooped by itself (sometimes for internal reasons beyond the newsroom, that happens at media companies).  I also have to give the Courant some credit for posting their story about this (at some organizations, a manager in over his head might have told the reporters to stay away from the story for legal reasons).

If this lawsuit goes through the court system without being settled, I wonder if the structures of the two newspapers will have changed so much, that they will no longer be in the newspaper business -- Or if they will even exist in a recognizable form a few years from now.

This issue so important to the JI that the organization is spending money to go to court over it.  Is it because the JI is charging for access to its web site, and therefore sees that as its business model?  Most newspapers don't mind if they are "properly" aggregated (the aggregator drives extra traffic to the aggregatee newspaper, giving the newspaper extra pageviews, and therefore more advertising revenue).  But if the JI's plan is to sell access to its web site to paying customers, then the newspaper would have to be vigilant about controlling the use of its stories.  That is difficult to do in the age of copy and paste.

I also wonder what the other newspapers that the Courant took its information from will do.