Campus Daily Guide and local news content
July 28, 2008 in Campus Daily Guide, College Media News, College Publisher
One of the questions raised by the Campus Daily Guide launch is how to handle news from the local campus newspaper if that campus newspaper is not a College Publisher affiliate. #
For instance, right now, Campus Daily Guide (CDG hereafter) has local portals for the University of Washington and the University of Wisconsin. However, neither of those schools’ student newspapers are CP partners. #
So, at present, if you go to their CDG sites (Washington and Wisconsin) the “Campus News” actually is an RSS feed for the University of Washington-Tacoma’s Ledger and the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire’s Spectator. #
This, despite the fact that the Wisconsin CDG page URL is uwm.campusdailyguide.com, as in Wisconsin-Madison, not Wisconsin-Eau Claire. #
This is going to be a thorny issue for CDG, especially if more schools go off the College Publisher grid (like University of Michigan’s Daily, which launched a new site this week). Indeed, the campus news links on the Michigan CDG point to Michigan Daily archives that show up as a 404 error. #
That's odd — your first link goes to CDG's main address, which then redirects to their Ohio State University page.
All they're doing is linking to articles on the newspaper's website. I can't see that being anything but good for the paper and I also don't see it making any difference whether the paper is on the CMN network or not.
To me, it's just another local news aggregator scraping content, no different than EveryBlock, Outside.in, Yourstreet, etc.
The Wisconsin mix-up seems like carelessness, and the Michigan one due to their transition.
What exactly is the thorniness of this issue?
Albert,
It's not a mix-up. Notice it's also the Washington site, and I've got an e-mail in to a CMN rep. to get things clear on the campus news angle. What is the thorniness? If CDG uses a CP network paper, there's already a contract in place to use content. If it's not a CP site, there could be legal action to prevent them from scraping headlines, or a demand to share in revenue.
It seems clear that the CDG folks steered clear of using content from non-CP sites in their first go-around.
that's what I meant by thorny.
Adam, that's weird. I'm getting the same redirect.
Well, I can't see the sites anymore, but it still doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
You're saying it's not a mix up, and that for the University of Wisconsin-Madison local website, they didn't want to use content from the University of Wisconsin-Madison student newspaper, because it's not a CP site. So instead they used web content from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.
Now I had to check a map for this, but Eau Claire and Madison are not even remotely close to each other. Tacoma and Seattle are a bit closer, but not enough that students at U-Dub would care about Tacoma news.
So if it's NOT a mix-up, then it's terrible and geographically senseless decision making.
You're right, it does seem that they have steered clear of using non CP content, but I can't imagine why. Now I only looked at the one for the University of Pennsylvania, but the local news section there was just links to content on the newspaper website, the content wasn't actually placed onto the CDG site.
Unless it was different for other sites, what possible justification could a newspaper have for suing CDG? For pointing people to their content? There's even less basis here than when the AP sued bloggers for linking to AP stories. At least there were excerpts there.
It's still a BETA. Everyone's judging this as if it's a finished, live site. I'm sure that's why they blocked access yesterday.
As for what sites they pull a news feed from, I'm sure they initially grabbed the stuff from their own CP system. But this whole system is built around technology that scrapes data from other sites — so I'm sure they could easily write the code to scrape a news feed from campus papers which aren't on the College Publisher platform. Most probably even offer an RSS feed, so it will be easy to do. And that's what I believe they will do by the time they go live.
Eric,
If you'll look at your GMail account, it's also a "Beta," even though I've been using it for over four years. As is Google Docs and Google News. These days, "beta" is a semi-useless term.
I'm sure they could scrape RSS feeds from other papers, much as I do at right with those icons that pull up posts from other people's weblogs. I could, however, see a campus newspaper arguing that the site is garnering readership from the newspaper's content, and therefore should receive some compensation.
And lest we all think this is settled, it's not, legally.
Bryan,
You're right that there are betas and there are betas… and the word doesn't mean what it used to. But in this case, it truly was a beta. I don't think they expected all this to blow up because they were still building the site and hadn't started talking to papers about it. It's clear to me, from looking at the site for our campus, that it's not yet fully baked. If this was the final product, I can pretty well guarantee it will crash and burn. But it's pretty obvious that this is a work in progress, and to suggest otherwise just because the word "beta" is over- or mis-used seems ridiculous to me.
As for what you're saying is a legal issue, what's the basis for that? There's no legal issue with linking to another site that I'm aware of. Does the Drudge Report license its content? Does Google? Of course not. I'm not aware of any legal issue when a web site contains links to content on other web sites. (There has been litigation over "deep links" that have not been resolved by the courts, but that's not what's at issue here.)
Eric,
as to your second question, I've written something that I will be posting later about this issue.
As to the first question, one has to wonder about the wisdom of putting a product out on the World Wide Web for anyone to see (I was able to get screenshots on Thursday, and this whole controversy was brewing since at least Monday) when it's in such an "alpha" phase.
And I should also note that the first version banner that I screencapped didn't even HAVE the word "Beta" in the corner.
And, if you'd read my earlier post about this, I noted that this was most likely a "work in progress, but it was being rolled out.
As of this moment – 7 p.m. EDT, July 29, 2008 – the site is live and points to the Ohio State University's Campus Daily Guide.
I don't know why they left the Ohio State site unblocked — maybe because there's no summer paper there and no summer staff there for them to work with. They blocked all the other sites because it *isn't* done. And yes, I read your earlier post that said it was being rolled out, and I keep trying to say in different ways that you're wrong about that. It wasn't ready, and "isn't" being rolled out yet. I don't know if they're days, weeks or months away from going live, but can we just accept that what' we all saw last week isn't the final product they're going to go live with, and move on.