Peter Scheer discusses the legal factors involved in instituting pay walls for online content, specifically the concept of “fair use.” He argues that the current interpretation of fair use — which enables people to rewrite the first few paragraphs of a story while maintaining the central ideas, as aggregators often do — will hurt some new sources more than others. Those that will suffer have news contained in the lead paragraphs, like wire services and major metropolitan dailies. Long-form journalism, such as that practiced by the New Yorker and hyperlocal sites, will fare better under this definition of fair use.
You can read Scheer’s blog post fromThe Huffington Post here.