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AP to Charge Members to Post Content Online
oboreruhito writes "The Associated Press has announced that, effective Jan. 1 2006, it 'will begin charging newspapers and broadcasters to post its stories, photos and other content online.' The article says online portals that are already subscribed to an online service won't be affected; the change is that newspapers and broadcasters, which have had the privilege of posting online at no extra charge over their usual licensing fees for print or TV, now have to pay extra. How will this affect sites like Google News and Fark?"
Why would it affect fark? They just link to em...
OMG F1R57 P057!
How will this affect sites like Google News and Fark?
My guess is not much at all. It's the sites that Google and Fark link to that will need to pay the AP. If the number of AP newswire sites drops, it will most likely be made up for by homebrewed stories citing the AP newsfeed as a source.
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
Google might be affected a little, but anyone that is paying the AP to carry the story will still have it posted, and google (or fark) could get to it that way.
Depending on how much they are charging, though it might force other sites to start charging online subscruption fees, as a large amount of free news will not be there anymore...
How will this affect sites like Google News and Fark?"
More boobies links!
Thanks, AP! : )
You can't take the sky from me...
It just links to them. Same with Google News. Google posts a blurb, but its length is short enough to avoid copyright infringement (i.e., less than 100 words). The images in Google News link directly back to the domain where the story was posted. Sounds like the AP is asking everyone to prioritize Rueters over them, inadvertently. It also sounds like the AP is starting to recognize the Internet as a very influential source of information. It's not nearly ubiquitous as radio and TV, but it reaches a powerful demographic.
Not so sure about Google and Fark which are purely online, but it seems logical that traditional newspapers will pass on the cost to their print subscribers.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Still, this has been a long time in coming. Popular sites like drudge/google news linking pictures from the AP wires, AFP, and other sources are:
#1: Not liscencing the content, which is exactly what the AP's et alls standard business practice is,
#2: Actually costing money due to bandwidth.
I don't think it's going to be long untill the major wires actually close their content to subscribers only. It would be a sad day for me, as I love getting my news hot off the wire, but I can understand why the AP/Reuters/AFP/UPI would do it.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
How does this affect me?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Why do slashdot articles end with inane questions that obviously aren't interesting or useful? They just drive discussion away from actual article. Instead, we have a whole page of people agreeing that this almost has almost no impact on Google or Fark.
(Yeah, yeah, offtopic.)
GET YOUR WEAPONS READY! --DR.LIGHT
This has to do with letting newspapers, etc., use the feeds they get from AP for online press. The newspapers are paying for the premium of having breaking stories delivered in preformatted form so they can get them out with little work. They pay so they can their news on time so their readers can in turn get their news on time through them. All the article is stating is that the AP is instituting a pricing cchange for this service that they have been providing and that it will affect what existing customers are paying.
Aggregators and bloggers link back to these sites but since they don't pay for an AP feed they have to wait for the news to be posted. Their situation has not changed as a result of AP's policy since they were never customers to begin.
This decision won't affect Google and Fark at all, since they simply link to other sites that post the AP's content. It will affect Yahoo! News, since they do post original AP content.
BTW, it's a PITA to use the AP's content. I used their feed to add headlines to the site for a TV station. They can't just have an XML feed; noooo, they have to post XML-formatted articles to a usenet server, adding an extra layer of complexity. You have to fetch the most recent post from the headline group, parse it for the links to the articles, then fetch the articles, then parse them for links to the image content, then fetch those articles, then parse them for the image content, which has to then be watermarked with the AP logo (or labeled directly underneath the picture; running it through ImageMagick to add the watermark was easier). (And to make matters worse, I had to write the stuff to do this in Perl running on Windows.)
To be honest, this doesn't really surprise me. I work for a company that provides newspaper-centric ISP services, and we've fought with AP for years over feeds, images, you name it. We host many of their partners, and we reduce the overal bandwidth between us and AP by doing a single aggregate feed which is only enabled for genuine AP-carriers. Yet time after time, we've had to argue with AP over the article posting rights of their own customers.
This is yet another kink they're throwing into the mix, as now we have to know which of the AP partners have actually paid for online publishing rights. This will likely irritate our programmers, and probably reduce the amount of our customers re-publishing AP data, but that's about it.
Personally, I don't understand the point of publishing AP online if you're a local paper, anyway. Often this data isn't differentiated from the paper's own articles, and ends up getting archived as such. Many papers these days require registration or pay-access to their archives, which are now diluted with articles that have been replicated thousands of times over by newspapers all over the country.
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
Maybe the AP will have explicit notifications in each story proudly proclaiming that
[It's just about that way already anyway.]
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Mod Parent Up.
If the wires are pay per view, the only news reported will be news that someone wants you to see, paid for by the interest the news best serves.
Poster might be going for funny, but I think there is lots of insight into that statement.
It will force news gathering and dissamation away from central media sources to a more distributed outlets that are harder to manipulate and have more direct accountability as a whole. It will also bring more individuality and integrity to the news process.
... and if the big media industry dies becasue of it, then that is their problem, not mine.
I can't count how many times I've seen the same old garbage re-hashed by diferent reporters who didn't know a damn thing about the story other than what the AP report told them. Hell, why didn't they just cut out the middleman and let me read the AP story myself without all the spin and personal BS opinions.
The truth is, what this is really about is the media industry living in a wet-dream that says "nobody should get reliable news free of charge, tracking, or advertizements" - well I hate to tell them this, but they can and they should