On May 14, O’Dwyers PR carried a column I wrote about the battle over publishing excerpts from David Kirkpatrick’s new book, “The Facebook Effect.” It struck me then as it does now that the problem had little to do with copyright and everything to do language.

The full text is below:

WAR OF WORDS SHOWS PRINT AND WEB DON’T SPEAK SAME LANGUAGE

By John Berard

The war of words – and potentially lawyers – between TechCrunch and Fortune is more than evidence that the web and print worlds don’t speak the same language; it is proof that they may not for a long time.

This will be costly to them and a disservice to their readers.

At issue were excerpts — either to print or on which to draw inspiration — from a new book about Facebook by long-time Fortune editor David Kirkpatrick. The public relations folks at the magazine made the offer to one of the leading web venues for technology news and insight, TechCrunch. That much is clear. That much may be all that is clear.

Fortune says “And if you don’t mind, once you’ve read the excerpts, please let me know if you choose not to post on one and not the other or both, which of course we would love.” TechCrunch hears, “Post the excerpt, please.”

From such tiny acorns can grow some mighty, hard as oak disagreements. But more than just being lost in translation, the disconnect is a public disservice. Fortune and TechCrunch are both trusted sources of information who need to get it together for the rest of us.

What makes the timing on this fight ironic is that it comes at a time when the web is working hard to create a fresh market for magazine and newspaper content.

As James Fallows notes in his cover story in the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly, “How to Save the News,” Google “now considers journalism’s survival crucial to its own prospects.”

And the iPad is being viewed as a way to rejuvenate the subscription business model savaged by the “information wants to be free” Internet. According to New York Magazine, “iWired, GQ, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Glamour will be the first Condé Nast magazines to have versions created specifically for the new Apple iPad.”

Both Fortune and TechCrunch seems to want to play a role in what comes next. Otherwise the magazine wouldn’t have offered and the web site would not have accepted. Each was committed to helping the author build value for his work and earn the gratitude of their readers by alerting them to the book’s arrival.

Each valued timeliness, relevance and making sure the guy who created the content got paid. With that much in common, how the heck did they get into a row? With that much in common, they can’t stay mad.

I am betting that the new working relationship between the world wide web and the universe of “All the News That’s Fit to Print” will prove valuable, unless it is killed by expectations set to high, standards set too low or a language barrier that cannot be overcome.

As publishers like Condé Nast fully embrace the rich-media, interactive and real-time nature of the Web and mobile devices they will be forced to learn the lingo. And as web publishers come to see the value of trusted content brands, they will work to partner.

That was the good intention of the deal Fortune and TechCrunch thought they had struck. The only question now is whether those good intentions are merely a paving stone on the way to, well, you know, or are they an early sign of the next big thing?

I am betting on the next big think but I do not underestimate how difficult it is to learn a new language.

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