The milk is free: my life as a journalistic prostitute

Want my article? No problem and no charge, sir!
Screen-grab courtesy of CultureKitchen.com

I was surprised when I did what us narcissistic college students often do: I Googled myself. (Image search, too!)

What surprised me was the number of media outlets where I found my own work posted. My most popular/infamous stories are about Facebook, fires, or student-athlete crime. I stopped counting the number of sites in which my stories appeared after the 10th Google page—I was too pissed off.

My literary music had been pirated.

(I'm partly lying: I wasn't really that mad, since my work was getting far more exposure than the Kansan could offer. But still.)

I love the Internet and the instant/free availability of content. But many of these stories were golden info for NFL or MLB draft prognosticators—in fact, several draft sites copied and pasted my KU athlete crime stories wholesale. Or should we say "no sale"? Because that's how it happened: these sites got the benefit of my specialized information completely for free.

Non-profit organizations and government offices (Kansas' alcoholic beverage control, for one) also copied and pasted my stories on fires or lawsuits or underage drinking to their Web sites. Attorney blogs loved the Sara Driessel lawsuit story. No charge, sir—it's all free today!

On the still-legal side of things, my stories also found their way via the U-Wire university newspaper wire service (to which the Kansan belongs) onto Yahoo! News, CBS's CSTV news, and even into other college newspapers.

Baltimore Sun columnist Jay Hancock nails this problem head-on in his recent article "Newspapers Need to Do it Different on Getting Paid."

Call me a hypocrite—I'm certainly not in favor of the hardline measures taken by record companies and film studios in response to pirated music or movies. But why not do it the way book publishers do? I'd be happy to sell my articles to anyone for a tiny royalty per view, or for a simple flat fee.

That's the rub. Is my content worth paying for? I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal in print and online because its content is worth the money. I don't subscribe to my internship-mater, the Kansas City Star, because it rarely publishes content I want that's unavailable someplace else. What I do know, however, is that content ownership and money must meet soon—I've got bills to pay.