"You've been hearing lately about the new electronic journalism that we are entering into." So begins a memo from management to department heads and section editors at The New York Times. With the policies the memo outlines, the newspaper is throwing a haymaker in the ongoing fight over the issue of who owns the electronic rights to free-lance material.

Although publishers generally have policies that give free-lance writers secondary publishing rights, many of them have been reluctant to apply those guidelines to material that is uploaded into an electronic database. Since a lot of money may eventually be at stake, writers have tended to see this as a land grab. "Once publishers realized there was no precedent in this," says Warren Strugatch, a Long Island-based free-lancer, "they began working to destroy the continuity between traditional laws and the new cyberspace realities."

In December 1993, before there was any stated policy, the Times found itself named as a defendant in a suit filed by the National Writers Union (see "Database Dollars: Follow-up," cjr, March/April 1994). The union is trying to prevent publishers and data companies from uploading stories by free-lancers without compensating them.

But in the July memorandum, which was obtained by cjr, the Times seems to be trying an end run around the lawsuit. Its new policy, which has the endorsement of publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., and executive editor Joseph Lelyveld, would require many of its free-lance writers to sign over all reproduction rights to their work. (Several sections, including the magazine and the op-ed page, are exempt.) The memo was blunt: "The paper's position on this is unambiguous: if someone does not sign an agreement, he or she will no longer be published in the newspaper."

The new policy immediately met resistance from the writing community. The National Writers Union, the American Society of Journalists & Authors, and the Authors Guild sent a statement of protest to Times editors and department heads. The letter, originally signed by thirteen prominent writers, has since gathered several hundred signatures, including those of some regular Times contributors, like Christopher Gray, Vicki Goldberg, and James Gleick. The writers' groups are also setting up mechanisms to help willing publishers distribute royalty payments to free-lancers when work is resold to databases.

So far, the Times has responded with some concessions -- granting some section editors the right to exempt important contributors from the policy. But a number of writers have submitted. "Approximately six hundred contracts have been signed and we're still counting, and only a handful have been refused," says Nancy Nielsen, a spokesperson for the Times. "We view this as a good response."

The Times's stature makes its new policy important, but it is hardly the only newspaper involved in this struggle. Others -- including the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and all thirty-two Knight-Ridder dailies -- have also begun circulating contracts to their free-lancers in the interest of retaining some measure of secondary publishing rights.

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