In a little more than a week, two interesting things have turned up in the news regarding cable TV and the Internet. Yesterday, the FOX network said it would stop broadcasting its shows over the airwaves if it lost a court case involving the tech company Aereo. That was news because last week, a court sided with Aereo in the latest legal decision.
Now what court case was that, exactly?
In a nice, concise story by Joe Mullin yesterday, arstechnica reported that this case and other recent decisions are turning against the cable giants in favor of the upstarts. The story referred to last week's case as "the appeals court decision ruling that Aereo doesn't infringe copyright." The rest of the story said more about FOX's threat and said all of the networks will continue to fight the case in court.
If you didn't already know what last week's decision was, you'd be in trouble.
But, as you might suspect, I'm leaving something out. The story linked to an arstechnica story last week on the court decision. So the background was easily accessible–but it wasn't there in the story.
It should have been. As easy as it is to click on the previous story, readers deserve a chance to read through the story they are looking at with enough background to understand what's going on. They can click for additional background–but they shouldn't have to click for essential backstory.
Cecilia Kang in The Washington Post took a very different approach, writing what amounted to a feature story about Aereo that began this way:
For consumers who want to cut their cable cord and get all of their television from the Internet, there’s been a major obstacle: It’s hard to get live sports and local news.
Now a Web start-up, called Aereo, is offering to remove that last barrier with a simple method. It is using antennas to pick up programming from public airwaves and then deliver shows into homes that have a Web connection — for as little as $10 a month.
The story got to FOX's threat in the fourth graf, but it had already neatly explained what Aereo was in the second graf, above. And that same fourth graf also provided this very brief but helpful summary of the court case: "In lawsuits, they [the networks] argued Aereo is little more than a content thief. But their efforts to persuade federal courts to shut it down have failed."
Sam Gustin at Time magazine leads with the FOX comment and also does a nice job providing background on Aereo and what it does, but quotes The New York Times regarding the court case. He might have done better to report the case himself.
And what, we might ask, did The Wall Street Journal–owned by News Corp., which owns FOX–write about this story? It did not lead with the FOX comment or the court decision. Instead, Shalini Ramachandran led with this: "The TV industry's best hope of shutting down TV startup Aereo Inc. anytime soon could rest, bizarrely enough, on a legal case involving something called Aereokiller LLC."
I hadn't noticed "Aereokiller" in other stories, and here it was in the lede. Ramachandran briefly describes the court decision in the second and third grafs, and then gets to FOX's threat to shut down its free broadcasts over the airwaves. Most of the rest of the story deals with Aereokiller, a copycat service that uses similar technology to do what Aereo does, but which has lost some court decisions, setting precedents that might threaten Aereo.
Others who didn't mention Aereokiller should have mentioned it. I didn't see any mention of it in The Washington Post or the arstechnica story from last week.
Decisions about how much background to include in a story can be tricky. Too much, and story seems bloated. Too little, and readers are left puzzled. Links can be helpful, by directing readers to more information, but they should not substitute for proper explanation and background in the story itself.
-Paul Raeburn
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