I just changed my editorial page template date from 2023 to 2024. It’s hard to believe another year has passed.
I’ve been writing this column for 34 years. That’s enough to fill 20 250-page books. And now I am 65 — retirement age!
Yet I have no desire to retire. In fact, 2024 may be the most exciting of my career. I’m a plaintiff in three significant lawsuits that could turn things around for my business.
One lawsuit is against Google for antitrust. Two are copyright lawsuits against the number two and three news aggregators in the country. This is going to be exciting.
There are also two bills before Congress that could get journalism back on its feet. One would force Big Tech to make royalty payments for republishing our news articles. Another bill would give payroll tax credits to journalists.
Both are now law in Canada as of this month. As a result, local journalism in Canada is having a renaissance.
Unfortunately, Google and Facebook are more powerful on their home turf in the U.S. They keep killing the bills just before they pass.
I am determined to do everything in my power to save local journalism. It’s critical to the future of our nation. We’ve never had such monopolistic control of news. Meanwhile, we’ve lost half our journalists over the last 15 years.
Thank the Lord, my brain still seems to work just fine. My brain is always going, going, going. No doubt, if I retired, I would find other avenues for my energy, but why not keep going until I can’t?
Both my father and grandfather never retired. They died while still working. I plan to do the same.
But it’s nice knowing that I’m at an age where society gives me permission to relax and slow down. The fact that I’m not feels like I’m earning extra credit.
I so believe in what I do and the importance of my company. Emmerich Newspapers produces 40,000 original local news articles a year. By far the most prolific local news content producer in Mississippi.
I have so many colleagues working in the company doing yeoman’s work covering their communities. It is an honor and privilege to work with them. I owe it to them and their communities to turn over every rock to find a way to survive. I am strapped in and fully engaged.
Just last week the New York Times filed a lawsuit against Microsoft’s Open AI for copyright infringement. This artificial intelligence program scrapes the web for content from which it produces its algorithms. It scraped tens of thousands of New York Times articles. It did the same thing to Emmerich Newspapers.
If Microsoft cannot prove “fair use,” a legal standard, then under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Microsoft will owe the News York Times billions of dollars in statutory damages.
Just this summer, the U. S. Supreme Court, in the Warhol case, significantly restricted fair use, setting the stage for a titanic legal battle between news producers and news scrapers.
It is pretty amazing that thousands of bots scrape our websites for content without any authorization at all. This parasitic practice is killing original content. How can you pay for the production of local news content if anyone can steal it and republish it? Something has to give.
Meanwhile, Emmerich News has created its own statewide platform that is used by over a million Mississippians each month. It’s essentially a network of local websites through which we share state news and even national and international news. And we don’t steal it. We pay for it.
Here’s an example: I attended the Stennis Press Forum at Hal & Mal’s. The state economist Corey Miller spoke. I whipped out my smartphone and a $20 tripod and recorded the talk. A few clicks on my smartphone, and the talk is posted statewide on 22 local websites. Fifteen thousand people have clicked on the video.
But it’s not Facebook. It’s not Nextdoor. It’s an independent, homegrown, Mississippi platform. No tracking or spying is involved.
We have Friends for social posting, Neighbors for local neighborhood posting. Why not support us instead of Facebook and these mega platforms?
We designed this from the ground up, using the dominant industrial strength open source content management system, Drupal. The platform is ours. We own it. We control it. We are no longer slaves to Big Tech.
Emmerich News is booming, having double digit growth for over five years. If we relied on Google Analytics, Google’s dominant website statistics program, our growth would be triple that. But we discovered that Google Analytics counts bots as real people, which greatly increases Google’s profit since Google ads charge by clicks.
Once we drilled down, we found about half those clicks had session duration times of less than a second. No real person leaves a website in less than a second. So we manually filter out these bot sessions. We are one of the few web platforms that doesn’t get sucked into this fraudulent behavior of overstating our views by playing the “bots are real people game.” This hurts us financially, but there is no price for integrity and honor.
One day, this country is going to wake up and realize that most of the traffic on the major platforms is just bots talking to bots. And now with artificial intelligence, bots can make comments, write reviews, post stuff and act like real live human beings.
This is why Elon Musk tried to back out of the Twitter deal. He realized that a huge chunk of the accounts were fake. But he had already committed and couldn’t find a legal exit. One more person sucked into the game.
One day, this will be the biggest lawsuit in all of human history, proving that the Internet powers that be allowed this bot fraud to continue because it was in their financial interest. More bots, more clicks, more clicks, more ad revenue. It’s becoming a house of cards.
This is the new robber baron age and I’m right in the middle of the maelstrom. As my wife Ginny likes to say: You’re the last man standing. Andrew Carnegie with his U. S. Steel and John D. Rockefeller with his Standard Oil have nothing on Google’s Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Twitter’s Elon Musk and Steve Job’s Apple. It’s the Federation against the Empire.
There’s one big difference: Carnegie controlled steel. Rockefeller controlled oil. Both vital to our economy, but not vital to our freedom. The new robber barons control the most vital resource of all: information. This is a threat to freedom throughout the world.
Save journalism, you save democracy. Save democracy, you save the United States. Save the United States, you save the world.
There’s no way I’m retiring. I’ve just begun to fight.
