Rolling Stone's McChrystal Story... Courtesy of Time and Politico
Actually, Rolling Stone's posting of its story about Gen. Stanley McChrystal -- you know, the one that got him fired as top commander in Afghanistan -- is more complicated than it looked at first blush when I posted about it last week. David Carr at The New York Times wrote yesterday that Time and Politico posted PDF versions of the Rolling Stone story early last week, well before Rolling Stone put it up on its own site. That caused, er, a few problems.
While you can sit and wonder why Rolling Stone didn't pull the trigger faster, one thing you can say is that it goes to show how much intellectual copyright is being abused these days when Time magazine -- of all media outlets -- actually publishes a competitor's story before the competitor does. Politico isn't exactly the sort of publication you'd expect to abuse copyright laws either, but apparently with an uproar brewing, the rule book doesn't matter. According to Carr:
Both companies said that a frenzy involving a significant national issue was under way and that because Rolling Stone itself did not post the article on its site, they took matters into their own hands.Of course, Rolling Stone balked when the two sites posted its story -- as well it should have -- and Time and Politico took it down. But there's fault to go around all over the place here. It's obvious from reading a so-called "tick tock" of how McChrystal lost his job that a PDF of the story was flying all over Washington early last week -- and that should have made it obvious it would make it onto the Internet whether Rolling Stone was the first to put it there or not. The irony is that it wasn't initially published by an irresponsible blogger but by much more respected organizations.
But those respected organizations, in their haste, didn't do what they should have done either. The rules of the road are still being written concerning how news organizations should behave in the Internet era, but the right thing to do, in this instance, would have been to warn Rolling Stone that the story was out there, and that it had better post it, already. Even if Time and Politico had held back, someone else would've come along and done it anyway. While we don't know how the PDF made it to Time and Politico, it was certainly in the Obama administration's best interest for the story to see the light of day quickly as justification of its decision to sack McChrystal.
Are there learnings here? A few, but the main one is that, in Internet time, no one's content is sacred. If you're the owner of a hot piece of content, hit the "Publish" button as fast as you can.
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