Blogs were originally seen as an alternative to the commercial press. Bloggers like the freedom to express themselves without worryting about any editorial constraints. Also, bloggers have come to believe that – irrespective of their political orientation – they are speaking the truth, while the commercial press is slanted to the requirements of advertisers.
All of these assumptions have been turned upside-down with the publication of a new tabloid in Franfurt. What is unusual about NEWS is that it has a daily feature called myblog which takes content from any number of German blogs on various topics – all without consent of the blogger/author. This has been the source of discussion and outrage in the German blogosphere. And some interesting questions have been raised: who owns the blog content once it is published to the Web? If it is the intellectual property of the blogger and is being used to sell newspapers, shoudn’t the author be entitled to royalties?
The Web site onlinejournalismus.de is singularly unimpressed by the effort so far:
Okay, sie haben es versucht. Aber über den drögen Charme einer Leserbriefseite kommt das Ganze bislang nicht raus. Es wirkt unsexy, uninspiriert, die Luft ist raus; auf der Website sind die Links nicht aktiviert.
But while some bloggers fear the experiment will destroy the transparency and the “information-democratic platform”, Megawatt – a blogger for Die Zeit points out what is surely true: most bloggers are ecstatic if their stuff gets noticed at all:
Wer bloggt, begibt sich in die Öffentlichkeit, ist es nicht so? Und wer sich dort befindet, darf allemal zitiert werden. In Wahrheit sind Weblogger glücklich, wenn sie überhaupt einmal wahrgenommen werden – noch glücklicher aber, wenn sie sich mordsmäßig über irgendwas ereifern können; das Weblogging ist – wenigstens hierzulande – oft nicht mehr als organisiertes Flaming (nur gut, dass ich über ein KI-getriebenes, vollautomatisches anti-Flaming-Tool verfüge).
So we have come full circle. Blogs, which were intended as an antidote to the dull sameness of the print media, have become a source of cheap content. That is the terrible genius of the modern culture of commercial consumption: it has the power to appropriate everything, even that which attempts to work against it.
