BOB GARFIELD: As many a conference agenda has hashed out, lost print circulation and classified ad revenue have undermined the old business model. But as the business heads online arises another big problem, the outright theft of content, what the industry sometimes calls reuse. In other words, an article may originate with The New York Times or the Associated Press, but it soon makes its way in whole or in part onto other websites that then sell advertising against it. In the copy-and-paste world of the Internet, stealing is a simple mouse click away, and newspaper articles are easy pickings. A group called the Fair Syndication Consortium has, for the first time, put out hard numbers identifying just how widespread the problem is. Joining us to discuss the study is Mark Fitzgerald, editor-at-large for Editor & Publisher magazine. Mark, welcome back.

MARK FITZGERALD: Thanks for having me, Bob.

BOB GARFIELD: First of all, Fair Syndication Consortium, who-dat?

MARK FITZGERALD: Well, that’s a ton of people. It’s got about 1100 newspaper members, and they're trying to get a solution to exactly that theft problem. They've got an idea that they can find out who is reusing newspaper content and then get them to partner with the newspaper and pay some money back.

BOB GARFIELD: So what are the numbers?

MARK FITZGERALD: It’s pretty astounding. They looked at only 157 newspapers. Now, that’s barely a tenth of the daily newspapers in the United States. And they found that more than 110,000 articles were swiped them from by 75,000 websites that were not given permission to use these articles. So, they're just grabbing this stuff.

BOB GARFIELD: That’s a lot of loot. How long did it take for them, you know, to back up the trucks to the loading dock? Did this take years to accumulate this number of stories, months - what?

MARK FITZGERALD: All of 30 days, from the 15th of October to the 15th of November.

BOB GARFIELD: Yikes. What constitutes swiping? Is it a simple link and maybe a headline to describe the piece that, you know, once you click on the link you go into the particular newspaper’s website? Or do you have to actually borrow much more text to be considered a thief?

MARK FITZGERALD: Yeah, newspapers don't mind having links like that. Newspapers, in general, like things like Google News, which is just a headline and a link, and it brings you into their site. No, what they're talking about is actually taking more than 80 percent of the words, the entire article, and just posting it up on their own site. And, not so coincidentally, there’s a little ad next to it, the revenue from which newspapers [LAUGHS] do not get.

BOB GARFIELD: You've seen this with your own work in Editor & Publisher, you know, which ain't The New York Times.

MARK FITZGERALD: [LAUGHING] No, exactly.

BOB GARFIELD: But it has an audience. [LAUGHS]

MARK FITZGERALD: Exactly. You know, I do not write deathless journalism, but last night I decided to take a look at just one story. Now, this is from August 21st, and the headline was “Moody’s Retains Gannett’s Investment Grade Rating but Warns of Possible Downgrade.” Now, I'm sure you’re still buzzing about that story.

BOB GARFIELD: Oh, yeah, I, I think it’s just below Tiger Woods on the -

MARK FITZGERALD: [LAUGHS]

BOB GARFIELD: - the most Google searches.

MARK FITZGERALD: And yet, that was taken by 500 sites, 500 sites, including sites in Polish, including something called the Institute for Allergies, Asthma and Immunology –

[BOB LAUGHS] - regular business type of sites. There are places on the Web that want to be, in effect, virtual newspapers that have the Tiger Woods story and my boring stuff, and it’s just “why don't you come here rather than go to The New York Times or The Chicago Tribune or The Sun-Times,” for instance?

BOB GARFIELD: Okay, so we've established the problem. It’s probably larger in scale than anyone imagined. Now what?

MARK FITZGERALD: And that is the problem, now what?

BOB GARFIELD: Oh, you know what? Hold it. Let me just stop you there. Hit the jingle.

GROUP SINGS JINGLE: Present and future business models for monetizing the newspaper industry.

BOB GARFIELD: Okay, that’s better. Now, solutions?

MARK FITZGERALD: Exactly the problem. There are maybe too many solutions. There may be too many models out there, at this point. You can have people pay a little bit for each little article that they have. You can have something that’s like a newspaper subscription where they pay a certain amount of money for a month’s worth of access to everything. You can wall some of your news articles off and let people see some stuff for free. There are a ton of solutions out there. The only thing that we really know is that something will be done and will be done rather quickly. Rupert Murdoch is the sort of lead pioneer on this, and he wants to wall off the news articles from The New York Post and The Times of London and the other newspapers and broadcast news organizations that he has. And I think that what’s happening is that everybody is, like, “after you, Rupert. Be our guest. You know, you be the penguin off the ice cliff first.”

BOB GARFIELD: So, pay walls are swell but let's just say your whole business is built around stolen content. What’s to stop you? Let's say you’re The Huffington Post, for argument’s sake, just subscribing to The New York Times, one subscription and then, you know, getting inside the pay wall and doing what you've always done, which is to lift large sections of content and put them on your website with a link and collect the ad revenue?

MARK FITZGERALD: Ah-ha, nothing. Nothing stops you right now. What many newspapers are looking for is a change in copyright law that would increase the penalties of the so-called “fair use” for news. As it stands now, you really can take most of, you know, copyrighted news material and just disseminate it anywhere you want, because of a change that Congress made in the copyright law about 20 years ago. If you would just go back to the copyright law that we had before the 1980s, some people argue, you would be able to threaten them with a lawsuit. You wouldn't really have to probably litigate much because the mere threat would be enough to have them either partner with you or not or just stop that theft.

BOB GARFIELD: Well Mark, thank you so much.

MARK FITZGERALD: My pleasure, Bob.

BOB GARFIELD: Mark Fitzgerald is editor-at-large for Editor & Publisher.