Poynter on the Record

Christopher Blanton has been a television news junkie for as long as he can remember. He not only watches TV news, he thinks about it, he talks about it, he writes about it. ...

And at a time when networks are trying to grow a shrinking news audience, Blanton ran Florida News Center, an online shrine to his passion on which he included video from some of the broadcasts he wrote about.

What happened to that site is a symbol of the looming struggle between new and old media. As broadband becomes a household standard, hobbyists are producing video content, vying for the same eyeballs television stations hope to attract, while television stations are hoping to lure viewers to the Internet.

The 25-year-old hospital worker started the site as a student at Plant City High School. But this spring, some of the TV stations he wrote about so devotedly demanded that he knock it off.

The stations' interest in his long-running site came just as network affiliates, and advertisers, are getting serious about the money to be made online. ...

[Another bay area Web site, News Channel 5] contains original video news content, but some areas, such as a traffic camera, are apparently linked back to television stations ...

The site's founder is a 16-year-old Tampa high school student, Ryan French. ...

"I personally believe that if you give credit to someone else and say this is theirs, and you use it on your site, I believe that should be okay," said French, whose site looks remarkably professional and acts as a mini news station, complete with some video clips he shoots himself, when he's not attending classes at Sickles High School. ...

Experts say there is room for debate, all coming down to whether the reuser's intent involves making or taking a profit. ...

If small bits are offered up for discussion, and there's no intention to profit off someone else's work, there's no harm, said Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute, the journalism school that owns the St. Petersburg Times.

"It comes down to fair use," she said. The concept of fair use is what allows reviewers to use snippets from books or a picture of a famous painting in a scholarly discussion.
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