I downvoted you because I think you provided an overly facile explanation that focuses too much on headlines rather than the actual issue here.
A headline has always been an attempt to sell an article access to headlines and has a long history of freely accessible for this reason. Publishers WANT links to their article to use their headlines because that is how the articles are sold.
You talk about the 'atomic unit of journalism' being reporting... but that isn't really a meaningful assertion. What is meaningful is that facts are not copyrightable (which is good.) If you are selling access to facts as your product, you have to differentiate yourself on either storytelling, curation or speed.
Notably, the California law covers all links, not just those that include a summary or headline.
I don't think the crisis has anything to do with aggregation. I think the crisis has to do with how money is spent on advertising, how much of that money Google is able to extract via their monopoly, and the degree to which we've allowed capital markets to gut such a vital institution. I think the EFF report linked in the article does a much better job of breaking down the issue, even if I don't agree with every recommendation it makes or think they are sufficient.
My point is that sharing links is a double edged sword that was sort of forced on the news publishers. They've grown dependent on the traffic -- and agreed, they need a different business model -- but thats tough when anyone else can undercut you and publish for free, and then compete for that same traffic.
Also, if you think you can differentiate on curation or speed, you cannot, because those same links will appear regardless.
And yes, the advertising monopoly is a huge part of this -- but the argument has always been that the search engines need news just as much as news needs search engines. But they've set up the situation in a way that they have all the leverage.
> sharing links is a double edged sword that was sort of forced on the news publishers.
What are you talking about? "sharing links" was not forced on publishers by anyone, not even sort of. Sharable links to content are not in any way damaging, so can't be a double edged sword. Sharable links are purely beneficial and you have done zero of the work to show otherwise.
A headline has always been an attempt to sell an article access to headlines and has a long history of freely accessible for this reason. Publishers WANT links to their article to use their headlines because that is how the articles are sold.
You talk about the 'atomic unit of journalism' being reporting... but that isn't really a meaningful assertion. What is meaningful is that facts are not copyrightable (which is good.) If you are selling access to facts as your product, you have to differentiate yourself on either storytelling, curation or speed.
Notably, the California law covers all links, not just those that include a summary or headline.
I don't think the crisis has anything to do with aggregation. I think the crisis has to do with how money is spent on advertising, how much of that money Google is able to extract via their monopoly, and the degree to which we've allowed capital markets to gut such a vital institution. I think the EFF report linked in the article does a much better job of breaking down the issue, even if I don't agree with every recommendation it makes or think they are sufficient.