Everyone Is a Wire Service Now

An original story costs weeks of a reporter's time, editorial review, and often legal review. A rewrite of that story costs forty minutes and captures a large share of the audience.

This asymmetry has always existed. What changed is the speed of the rewrite and the number of outlets doing it, which compresses the window in which the original publisher holds an advantage to something close to nothing.

The predictable response has been to produce less of what is expensive and more of what is cheap, which is why analysis, aggregation, and commentary have expanded while the number of people covering an institution full time has fallen.

There is no clean fix inside the current arrangement. Every proposal that has worked at any scale involves someone paying directly for the expensive part, which is a much harder sell than it should be for a product whose value only becomes obvious once it is gone.

The legal position is the part most people assume is protective and is not. Copyright law protects the expression of a story and does not protect the facts in it, which is a deliberate choice with a long history behind it.

That choice is correct. A rule that let the first publisher own a fact would be far worse than the problem it solved, and every serious proposal to change it runs into that objection immediately.

So the rewrite is lawful, and the complaint has to be economic rather than legal. The second publisher is not stealing anything. They are declining to pay for something they can obtain free.

The registry exists to record authorship and it records the article, not the reporting. The weeks of work that produced the facts leave no protectable trace at all.

The compression is the genuinely new part. When a rewrite took a day, the original publisher held the audience for a day, and a day of attention was worth something. When it takes forty minutes, the advantage is gone before most readers have arrived.

The response has been rational and is visible in what gets commissioned. Analysis is cheap, defensible and hard to rewrite persuasively, because the value is in the argument rather than in the facts.

That produces a market with a great deal of interpretation and a shrinking amount of new material to interpret, which is a stable arrangement right up until it is not.

The public alternatives are underused and they are free. A comment file on any consequential rule contains material nobody has written about, and the register publishes decisions in advance of their effect rather than after it.

Working from those sources produces something a rewrite cannot easily capture, because the value is in having read three hundred pages rather than in holding a fact for an hour.

It is a partial answer and it should be described as one. Documents do not cover a council meeting, and no amount of published material substitutes for a person present when a decision is taken.

The proposals that work at scale all involve someone paying directly for the expensive part. Subscriptions, philanthropy and public funding are the three, and each has a well known failure mode that its advocates tend to skip past.

What none of them can do is repeal the asymmetry. Original reporting will always cost more than repeating it, and any arrangement that survives will be one that decides to pay the difference on purpose.

It is worth resisting the nostalgia that usually attaches to this argument. The wire services were themselves a mechanism for reusing one reporter's work across hundreds of mastheads, and nobody at the time called it a crisis.

The difference is that the wire was paid for by the outlets that used it. The current arrangement reuses the work without the transfer, which is the whole of the change and is not a change in ethics.