We have to take issue with with Jennifer Oladipo’s follow-up story in LEO this week.

Pimentel said the two sides had reached an agreement about the station’s expectations for how its content would be used, but declined to give specifics. He said WHAS would look at how user-friendly locating (and therefore linking to) video content is on its own site, once its Web content manager position is filled. In the meantime, he said the station doesn’t consider use of entire news segments as protected under Fair Use, nor is content that is posted unaccompanied by comment — links or no links. But yeah, there should be links.
No one will discuss any quid pro quo, but evidence suggests that WHAS has agreed to play fair as long as The Ville Voice and Page One agree to play a little fairer.

We linked to WHAS all the time– when we could, as their site is nearly impossible to navigate and uniquely devoid of content. We most frequently link to Mark Hebert’s blog because he’s quick with breaking political news.

We’ll assume she doesn’t completely understand the case as it was explained to her and is referring to a lack of links to WHAS on YouTube itself– the only area where we’ve not provided links to WHAS in the past. In our YouTube video descriptions we’ll be adding a link to WHAS11.com. As noted in the story, our critiques and discussion hit the web within minutes of broadcast– often hours (or days) before the information is available on the WHAS website. So a generic link may be all we can provide. At least for the time being and until content is provided more regularly by the station. We certainly will be making a concerted effort to link back to original stories when they become available. But as we pointed out yesterday, our audience isn’t WHAS’s core and we shouldn’t be considered competition. (Side note: We’re hopeful that WHAS11′s soon-to-be-hired web content manager begins to make video available for embedding on other sites. The station can still make money by including advertisements in the clips. Linking back to an occasionally available Windows Media file just isn’t viable.)

We told Jennifer via phone as she wrote the story that there was never really a disagreement or an issue about linking with WHAS. That’s purely LEO’s contention. (Though, in the past there has been an issue with a single employee.) We’re not sure why she went that route. The station itself has never said it takes issue (as we have learned) with our operation and we’re providing links as a courtesy. A courtesy that should make our criticism more balanced by giving readers access to both sides of a story when appropriate.

And yes, we are gracious people. Why wouldn’t we be after we were treated so well by station management? That should have been made more clear instead of pitting us against them in print. The bigger issue here is that old media is starting to figure out how to exist with new media. Sometimes it just takes a disagreement or bit of confusing to get the ball rolling.

It would have helped had we been given a chance to react after station management was interviewed. We were informed just before the story went to press that no one at the station would speak on the record. The writer had agreed last week to give us (Jake) a chance to respond if she was able to get comment. But we digress. And we’re selfish– where are the links to our websites in the story, LEO? We love you, but come on! We’re suckers for publicity and would have loved you more for some linkage.

Click here to read the rest of the update.