Irish Newspapers: We Want You to Pay to Link to Us

We live at a time when longstanding institutions are being shaken and threatened in ways neither they nor we could have expected a generation ago. The print media is the classic example. Newsweek simply stopped printing its print magazine, and hardly anyone noticed. Ad revenues are down, subscription walls are not working, and in general a business model of very long standing is dissolving before our eyes.

But the Irish newspapers take the cake. They have been pushing for a law that would actually require payment for links to their articles. This position has been roundly ridiculed around the world. But here’s something interesting:

The one place you won’t have read about the Irish newspapers’ demands is in an Irish newspaper. Nor will you have read about the fact that the NNI, representing all the national newspapers – including the Irish Times, the Irish Independent and the Examiner – sought in 2012 to have a specific new law created to outlaw linking to articles. You won’t have read it, because not one Irish newspaper printed a drop of ink on this story. Kardashian Baby? News. Efforts to outlaw how the internet works? Not news.

TJ

As a journalist, I’ve been watching this unfold from an internal perspective, and it is very fascinating. I just hope when newspapers, particularly the less favorable ones, go under nobody will scream they’re “too big to fail” and lobby the government to bail them out or subsidize them.
Anonymous

As a relatively young person, I hate the idea that people who didn’t grow up with the internet and technology want to dictate how it works to the rest of the world. A few years back there were complaints by Google that crawling their sites and posting their links should be something that Google should pay for, while neglecting to point out that merely using a robots.txt file can prevent that should they choose. These guys want to have their cake and eat it too and then charge the baker for that honor!