Stateside With Rosalea: Massachusetts

Screenprint its name lengthwise on State Commemorative Condoms and Massachusetts would be at the high-value end of the market because it has the most (and mostly fat) letters of any one-name state in the country. (Alas, poor Utah!)

Home to the oldest higher learning institution in the nation—Harvard—it was the sixth state to ratify the US Constitution, and is named for the Great Blue Hill near Boston that is easily visible from the sea. Which explains why the call letters of the Public Broadcasting Service’s station based there is WGBH. They’re very well-known in the US (and around the world) for educational TV series, for Masterpiece Theatre—which, for decades, was hosted by Alistair Cooke, better known in NZ for his radio Letter From America—and for historical series such as the upcoming We Shall Remain, a history of the Native American experience.

But did you know that WGBH also helps deaf and blind people enjoy the movies? Its Media Access Group provides two services for moviegoers—the RearView system for the deaf and a descriptive service for blind movie patrons. Last weekend, I thought I’d check out the system for the blind and went to a nearby cinema that has a suitably equipped auditorium, was given DVS headphones, and settled in to have The International described to me.

Alas, poor Clive! That movie only has RearView available . I had told the ticketseller that I didn’t think The International was DVS-enabled, but she assured me that it was. Still, I got a free pass to see another movie and can’t wait to have Frost/Nixon described. I’m very curious how much description an interview needs. At the very least, the headphones were comfortable, kept my ears warm, and filtered out the rustling of candy wrappers by my neighbors.

Another media story I came across while researching MA has a very scary aspect to it. Just look at the share history of GateHouse Media here. In October , 2006, an investment in one thousand of its shares was worth $21, 600. As of March 4, 2009, those same shares—now increased in number to 1,371—are worth $123.35. Percent return: minus 99.43.

In Massachusetts, GateHouse Media New England publishes eight daily newspapers, 31 free weeklies, 85 paid weeklies, and nine “shoppers”—free papers that are almost completely made up of advertisements, coupons, and the like. I recommend reading GateHouse’s 2007 annual report as background for understanding the news industry in the US.

Eastern Massachusetts is also served by GateHouse’s WickedLocal hyper-local news websites. Some of the 159 communities served by WickedLocal (“wicked” is New England parlance for “very”) are suburbs of Boston, and recently GateHouse filed a lawsuit against the New York Times, which owns the Boston Globe, challenging

“the repeated conduct of defendant's boston.com since November 2008 in copying and displaying verbatim on boston.com's "YourTown" websites for the Boston suburbs of Needham, Newton and Waltham headlines and leading sentences from news articles taken from GateHouse's local newspapers and its hyper-local websites for each of those towns at WickedLocal.com.

“Boston.com has reproduced this information without GateHouse's authorization or consent, and has done so in a manner which confuses the public as to the original source of the information by passing off GateHouse's original content as its own and which completely relies on the expertise, experience, efforts, expenditures and resources of GateHouse. This is both copyright and trademark infringement, as well as unfair competition.”

The New York Times filed a counterclaim and, this January, in a settlement that involved neither money nor admission of wrongdoing by either party, GateHouse agreed to “implement one or more commercially reasonable technological solutions intended to prevent Defendants’ copying of any original content from GateHouse’s websites and RSS feeds” and vice versa. Linking and deep-linking to each other’s websites will still be permitted.

Alas, poor citizen journalists! Who, I’ll wager, do not get one penny of GateHouse’s “expenditure” on its “original content”, which is, according to the WickedLocal website, “available for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons license, except where noted.” For an interesting discussion of where this kind of battle is going and why “journalistic outlets are moving to a hyper-local model” see this March 3 post on Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab’s blog.

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

--PEACE--

© Scoop Media