Say what you will about the RIAA. Ultimately, it made the trains run on time.

The Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group for the U.S. music industry, has made many enemies in the Web world for its draconian approach to copyright. It killed Napster and has tracked down and snuffed out one peer-to-peer file-sharing service after another. It has also famously sued random college students for their file-sharing misdeeds, scaring the bejesus out of parents everywhere.

The Opportunity Costs of Stealing

All of which set things up perfectly for the iPod. Sure, college students (and everyone else) would prefer free songs to 99-cent songs, but considering the opportunity costs — possible lawsuits, nagging parents, file-sharing service providers forced to hide in caves, etc. — 99 cents suddenly sounded like a pretty good deal.

And so, while certainly the music industry has its challenges, at least more people are paying for music now than stealing it.

Which is something that can’t be said for the newspaper industry.

Newspapers have been struggling with content theft from the moment the word “blog” was coined 10 years ago. Unfortunately, until the last three or four years, they didn’t know they were struggling with it. Now that they do know, all they’ve really done to combat the threat of blogs is to create their own blogs.

Great! More content to steal!

Here’s a thought: the newspaper industry is basically responsible for the entire boom in blogging — arguably the biggest revolution in the news media in decades. It’s responsible because the vast majority of bloggers (with the exception of those who have professionalized and begun doing original reporting) write their posts based on the coverage of paid news staffs. Back when I started blogging in early 2005, it was common to see blog posts that consisted of entire stories from the New York Times or other papers, cut and pasted into the post — then with a little, “Gosh, isn’t that interesting?” thrown in at the end.

If newspapers complained, bloggers sneered condescendingly that the media bigshots “just didn’t get it.” Didn’t the newspapers understand that these blogs, by linking back to the source article, were sending traffic their way? Heck, they weren’t stealing content — they were doing the newspapers a favor!

And so we see, in 2009, that the newspaper industry is on the verge of collapse.

Struggling to Find Answers

Look, I’m no apologist. I’m the first to admit that if the newspaper industry dies, it will be at least partly from self-inflicted wounds. But one of these wounds is that the industry has never found an effective way to defend its content against theft.

Back in 2002, when I was vice president of corporate communications for the media company Belo Corp., I helped illustrate this fact — unintentionally. Belo’s attorneys had determined that the company had the right to prevent outside Web sites from linking to individual articles within its media sites — a practice known at the time as “deep linking.” I had the task of being the spokesperson for this argument.

Unfortunately, that horse already had left the barn — and wasn’t coming back. So-called “deep linking” is basic to how the Web works today.

Other media companies have had no better luck in protecting their content. And so now we have thousands of Web sites all reporting the same news — with only a small handful actually paying for the reportage that supports this entire infrastructure of information.

And that small handful — the newspapers — are running out of money, and out of time.

Tracking and Charging

I was inspired to scribble all this down because I read an op-ed piece in The Dallas Morning News by John Chachas, managing director of Lazard, a financial advisory company. Chachas laid out his prescriptions for fixing the newspaper business — including this creative proposal for dealing with content theft:

Newspapers should be granted a finite (36-month) anti-trust law exemption to permit deployment of an industry-wide system to track and charge for re-use of their content. Whether that is accomplished through a “rights society” as with music publishers, or through the use of electronic watermarks, which could facilitate digitized tracking and usage charges, publishers cannot continue the practice of paying for the editorial staffs to source the news and then have it used for free by competing web aggregators.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? But it made me wonder: Why is this idea appearing as an op-ed by a mergers-and-acquisitions consultant in 2009? Why hasn’t the newspaper business been lobbying to achieve this, or something like it, for years? Or at least, why isn’t it doing so today?

For all our sakes, let’s hope this great industry figures things out before it’s too late.

[A version of this post originally appeared at Black Star Rising.]

I love journalists. Hell, I used to be a pretty good newspaperman myself, and the blogosphere has given me a chance to dabble in the discipline of journalism again here and there. I also work daily to convince CEOs who are suspicious of the media (is there any other kind?) that most journalists do their jobs with integrity. I annoy my corporate clients when I tell them what I believe: that you’ll hear more heartfelt discussion of ethical questions in a newsroom than you’ll ever hear in a boardroom.

Having stipulated all that, let’s be real: Reporters are known to occasionally flip the script on their subjects.

By “flip the script,” I mean they sometimes will give you the distinct impression they are writing something that will flatter you or otherwise serve your interests — when all along they’re planning to eviscerate you with the spiral binding on their reporter’s notebook.

Is this ethical? Let’s just say I’ve known reporters who feel bad about doing it. But frankly, it’s a necessary part of good journalism. A classic example is brilliantly portrayed in the 2005 film Capote. In the movie, author Truman Capote struggles with his deception of killer Perry Smith; the scene where he refuses to admit to Smith that his book is called “In Cold Blood” is painful to watch.

Was Capote’s behavior wrong? You tell me — but it resulted in the greatest nonfiction book of the 20th century.

I’m no saint; I’ve done it myself. In fact, I won an award from the Associated Press Managing Editors of Texas the time I did it to televangelist Robert Tilton. Tilton was riding high and making millions when I talked with him in 1990. He hadn’t done a media interview in years, and he chose me because he was convinced I was a naive kid who would buy the snake oil he was selling. I never lied to him — but I also never said a word to disabuse him of the notion that I was that naive kid. My story was the beginning of the end of his ministry.

Of course, day-to-day examples of flipping the script aren’t always this heroic. Sometimes people just get screwed.

So, as you prepare your CEO for that next big interview with the news media, what are the warning signs that a reporter plans to flip the script on you? Here are eight of them:

1. The journalist is vague about the story angle.

Reporters don’t call you unless they have a pretty good idea what they’re going to write about. For example, they might want to profile you as a fast-growing company in your industry, or they might want your take on a specific trend or controversy. If you ask them their angle and they mumble something that doesn’t sound like a focused story idea, it might be because their real angle is that they think your CEO is a crook.

2. The journalist has a history of hard-hitting reporting or pointed commentary.

After being contacted by a reporter you don’t know, the first thing you should do is Google them to see what kind of stuff they write. If you go through a half-dozen CEO profiles and find one coronation and five eviscerations, those probably approximate your odds.

3. The media outlet typically does not have nice things to say about people like you.

Be mindful of the slant of the publication. For example, alternative weeklies traditionally take an anti-business approach. Unless you’re an upstart entrepreneur who is doing something disruptive to the status quo, this kind of outlet may not be for you. More and more mainstream media outlets are falling into political camps as well; if you’re a non-profit organization dedicated to reducing carbon emissions or saving lab rats, don’t go on Fox News unless you want your cause ridiculed before a national audience.

4. A competing media outlet has just said something nice about you.

Reporters hate getting beat on a story. They also hate doing the same story someone else just did. So if you’ve been the subject of some laudatory coverage, you’re eventually going to meet up with a reporter who wants to knock you off your high horse. Be prepared.

5. The journalist is reluctant to tell you who else has been interviewed for the story.

You can learn a lot by asking a reporter who else he or she has interviewed for the story. For example, if the reporter has prepared for the upcoming meeting with your CEO by talking to a bitter business rival or even-more-bitter ex-wife, you might be in for a bumpy ride. If a reporter hems and haws when you ask the question, that might be all the answer you need.

6. The journalist is uncomfortable when asked his or her point of view.

It’s often useful to ask the reporter his or her point of view on a controversial issue. Many reporters share their perspectives freely when their opinions are neutral or in alignment with yours. When they think you’re full of it, on the other hand, they tend to ramble on about objectivity and how the “story is about you, not me.” If they start talking like that, you’re probably toast.

7. The journalist gives nonverbal clues that suggest deception.

The general clues people use to determine if someone is being deceptive (microexpressions, for example) are helpful in a face-to-face interview. When reporters are distant, make little eye contact, and seem overly protective of what they’ve written in their notebook, you might be in trouble.

8. The journalist makes it apparent that he or she has already done ALL of the reporting for the story — except for talking to your CEO.

You’re dead meat now. The reporter has lined up everything and just wants to fire away at you — “I’ve discovered this document in your trash; I have the chatroom transcript; I talked to your mother-in-law; what’s your response?” Duck and cover.

Even if you strongly suspect a journalist is planning to flip the script on you, that doesn’t mean you should respond with a “no comment.” In fact, you still need to provide the reporter with information and, in many cases, the CEO should go ahead with the interview.

But you’d better go into it ready — focused for battle, talking points down cold, with both guns blazing. And record the conversation.

[This post is also at MarketingProfs.]

[This post is a Media Orchard Classic.]

[Image source]

It’s OK not knowing it’s spelled “Eliot” in the case of Eliot Spitzer, New York’s most famous john (as opposed to “jon”.)

But shouldn’t you at least find out before you publish your story in:

The Nation?
People?
The Washington Post?
Atlanta Journal-Constitution?
FrontPage Magazine?
The Australian?
On Faith?
Morristown Green?
Napa Valley Register?
The Sentinel?
The Gazette?
WFMY?
WKBW?
KOMO?

Or in scores of other outlets, like Newsday, CNN and others, that have gone back and corrected their errors — online at least?

Are the lax accuracy standards of blogs seeping into mainstream media — and particularly the blogs of mainstream media? Or is Google just making it a lot easier to catch the media with their knickers down?

That’s just a figure of speech, by the way, Elliot. I mean, Eliot.

Earlier this week, I asked a small class of journalism students at the University of North Texas to tell me the Web sites where they spend the most time. The 11 students each provided a list of three sites. I thought you might be interested in the results:

DallasNews.com (5 votes)
Yahoo! (5 votes)
WFAA.com (4 votes)
Facebook (3 votes)
CNN.com (2 votes)
MySpace
ESPN.com
MSNBC.com
Google
AOL
MSN
Reuters.com
Flickr
Yahoo! Sports
Wired News
Jasmyne Cannick
Wordpress
Weather.com
Allrecipes.com

I generally don’t post one-offs from the Web on Media Orchard anymore; that’s what Spin Thicket is for. But I’ve probably watched this news report about 1,000 times now, and I’m hoping by showcasing it here it will see fit to release me from its hypnotic spell.

Enjoy.