Assorted Afflatuses

Watching this lovely little video last night, I had a brilliant idea.

In the her five-minute talk at TED, Alisa Miller outlines an interesting problem facing America. On the one hand, ever more Americans have an interest in what she calls, "overseas news." Opposite that, the American news media spends fewer and fewer dollars collecting and reporting that so-called "overseas news" because international coverage costs a fortune. In an era when most newspapers struggle to subsist, much less maintain vast numbers of foreign bureaux, this is understandable, but troubling nonetheless.

A little more digging produced an equally interesting cartogram from the Online Journalism Blog, which also provided a little more insight.

As far as I can tell, the amount of coverage a particular news outlet gives to a region is predicated on the language spoken there. It hardly seems surprising to learn L'Humanité, an infamously liberal, once-communist French-language daily, spends much of its time coverage France and French-speaking regions of Africa. Nor does it challenge logic to discover The Australian focuses its coverage on the United Kingdom, South Africa and India, all regions with concentrations of English-speakers.

So, I thought, why not hunt down a glut of polyglots to translate news from foreign sources and repackage the content online in some sort of editorial context? After all, such a model would allow the editors to find the right balance of global coverage, therefore no region of the world would receive a disproportionately small amount of coverage, and, by simply translating existing coverage rather than sending reporters everywhere from Sao Paulo to Shanghai, the huge cost barrier disappears.

Naturally, I failed to take intellectual property rights into account.

For, as I quickly recalled, translations of copyrighted works (i.e., the articles published by foreign news outlets) were not free to commercially exploit. One needs to obtain permission from and, in most cases, pay some kind of royalty to the rights holder.

In many cases, this extension of copyright protection makes sense. Joanne Rowling might have had less of an incentive to publish if she knew any foreign-language translations of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban would not net her a penny, while some unknown Vietnamese translator made a fortune with his translation of her work.

Of course, foreign news outlets would only stand to gain from licensing English-language translations of their stories to my theoretical international news aggregation service. But even if they were intelligent and agreed to license their content, I suspect my theoretical start-up firm would be unable to afford the licensing fees.

Which more or less sinks my idea. Without content, I would have no way to amass a following of readers sufficiently large to provide the revenue to pay for the content. A Catch-22 if ever one existed.