AP Says "Share Your Revenue, Or Face Lawsuits"

eldavojohn writes "The Associated Press is starting to feel the bite of the economic recession and said on Monday that they will 'work with portals and other partners who legally license our content and will seek legal and legislative remedies against those who don't.' They are talking about everything from search engines to aggregators that link to news articles and some sites that reproduce the whole news article. The article notes that in Europe legislative action has blocked Google from using news articles from some outlets similar to what was discussed here last week."

Comments

If you don't want people looking at it

[Alarindris]

don't put it on the friggin internet!

Re:If you don't want people looking at it

[interkin3tic]

I think they'd probably prefer not to, they'd prefer to go back to simpler times, before this damn internet thing, when they were still making money hand over fist.

If they succeed in this, the only thing that will happen is that some of my news portals will have less actual content and more blogging/editorials/crap (like fashion and celeb news).

Re:If you don't want people looking at it

[InsertWittyNameHere]

NO! You get off my lawn! Damn whippersnappers and their mobile devices with aggregated digital news.

Back in my day if we wanted the news we had to walk to the newsstand, uphill both ways, and pay a hard earned nickel for it!

Re:If you don't want people looking at it

[Asic Eng]

I think they have a case when talking about "sites that sometimes reproduce articles whole" - it's clearly unfair to do that.

However to asking money from sites that merely link to the articles? That seems over the top and counter-productive. After all that brings traffic to the site which hosts the article. Linking itself must be free speech, and using the headline and 1-2 sentences in order to describe the link must be fair use.

One goal of The A.P. and its members, she said, is to make sure that the top search engine results for news are "the original source or the most authoritative source," not a site that copied or paraphrased the work.

That goal is ok, but they have no right to prevent a search engine from giving the user the site they are most likely looking for. If that's a site discussing the news, rather than the site presenting the news, they can address this by making their own sites more attractive. In any case - they get a link out of it.

Other than that: if you really don't want to be indexed (and not just pretend you don't because you want to get money from the search engines) then just use robots.txt.

Re:If you don't want people looking at it

[timeOday]

I think they'd probably prefer not to, they'd prefer to go back to simpler times, before this damn internet thing, when they were still making money hand over fist.

Oh, do you really think news was ever such a lucrative racket?

The news outlets have really thrown themselves to the mercy of the Internet revolution, sticking by their values, and look where it got them. I am very worried about the decline of "real news" in the US. A million bloggers don't make up for one real investigative reporter who has the time to do the legwork because they're paid to do it. I am starting to think we need some new law, like more stringent copyright within the first 24 hours after publication.

Re:If you don't want people looking at it

[Ethanol-fueled]

more blogging/editorials/crap (like fashion and celeb news).

Like Newsweek? I took these examples from the website but the print editions are worse - more than half the mag is dedicated to ads and pop culture BS. If they don't want the internet to eat their lunch then they should print a magazine worth reading. Sure, Newsweek isn't exactly the New Yorker or Foreign Policy magazine, but it's really went downhill from being the respectable news rag I read as a kid.

Re:If you don't want people looking at it

[WoLpH]

Seeing as how most slashdot articles don't hit till atleast a couple of days after the original article. I'd say it would probably have to be a week for it to be effective. After which it would be old news and not beneficial at all...

Re:If you don't want people looking at it

[lucas_picador]

It's even more ridiculous and pathological than that: the AP is simultaneously whining about how aggregators link to their articles and also about how search engines DON'T link to their articles. This is typical schizophrenia from an industry that is in hysterical denial because the world has changed and their business model no longer works. They can't even articulate what they want; they just want to go back to the way things used to be, when Mommy used to play with them and feed them all day. Embarrassingly infantile.

Re:If you don't want people looking at it

[Locklin]

A million bloggers don't make up for one real investigative reporter who has the time to do the legwork because they're paid to do it.

How many of those are there in the "real news?" Virtually everything is commercial or government "press releases" and "fluff news." The only leg work I see (as an outsider) are embedded reporters in various wars -which, for all their impartiality, are probably just as easily paid by the military.

I would pay for a news source that was just "investigative journalism," but why would I pay for 99.9% press releases and some "commentary" thrown in?

Re:If you don't want people looking at it

[Eldragon]

Considering how 24 hour news networks (aka CNN) have been around for almost 30 years, and they have never managed to have any sort of investigative reporting, I think the decline of "real news" was a problem long before the internet hit the mainstream.

I think the Internet is going to bring us much better investigative reporters than we could ever expect from the traditional media. Michael Yon is an excellent example of what we can expect from the modern internet investigative reporter.

Re:If you don't want people looking at it

[Anonymous Coward]

The news outlets have really thrown themselves to the mercy of the Internet revolution, sticking by their values, and look where it got them. I am very worried about the decline of "real news" in the US.

That's why the real news declined, because the news people pushed their liberal values instead of reporting on reality.

Re:If you don't want people looking at it

[JWSmythe]

    IMHO, it all started when the newspapers started to favor the wire services over their own reporting. They had to pay into it anyways, and paying the wire service fees could be cheaper than providing your reporter a desk, car, phone, etc, etc, etc. Oh ya, and their paycheck.

    Most websites and even print papers, are full of wire stories that they didn't originate. Those stories did start somewhere, but.....

    Then again, how many papers, TV stations, and web publications need to send their own reporters out to cover the same story? It's cheaper and easier to send one out and let everyone copy the story for a few bucks (going to AP/Reuters/UPI/or whoever)

Re:If you don't want people looking at it

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

The news outlets have really thrown themselves to the mercy of the Internet revolution, sticking by their values, and look where it got them. I am very worried about the decline of "real news" in the US.

As someone whose formative newspaper, and other news source, reading years were essentially from 2001-2006, I must completely and totally disagree with you.

I'm not sure exactly what newspaper values were in the later decades of the twentieth century. But I certainly do know what they are in the early years of the 21st. They are the values of the establishment, as newspapers in particular are a central and inextricable part of the establishment. I watched paper after paper after paper, day after day after day, tow the party line, stifle dissent, spin stories upside down, manufacture controversy, manufacture consent, treat the powerful with kid gloves, and viciously destroy those who could not defend themselves.

In 2003, literally millions of people marched against the war in Iraq while not one major newspaper went against it. Every last prominent newspaper in the western world supported that war. In the aftermath, they continued to support it. Amid the scandals and lies that followed it, they still supported it, and freely repeated the excuses for the excuses for the excuses. They were all little more than government press sectrecaries, the world over.

And it's not just the war. That was only the most grievous failing of the newspaper industry. When it came to the financial industry, to the graft, to the unjust laws, to the violations of the rule of law, I can't recall a single serious newspaper investigation into anything aside from sex scandals and knife crime. How many important stories have we seen posted on Slashdot that will never, ever see the front, or any other, page of any national or international newspaper. Newspapers are toothless, only having fangs for those who they know cannot fight back. They have not, in my memory, ever seriously attacked those in secure positions of power. Ever.

I open up a newspaper and all I see is district court case reports, astroturf, human interest stories, AP stories and sports news. Oh and opinion. Opinion, opinion, opinion, opinion, opinion. Commentary and analysis from wholly unqualified windbags, and every letter of it bought and paid for.

You ask me why the newspaper industry is failing? The Internet!? Not likely. The reason they are failing is because they have failed to provide news, the "real news" you claim they still offer. They don't. Newspapers and the entire media industry have offered an entire generation nothing but tripe, gossip and the offical government line, and in so doing they have lost that generation. Probably forever.

I will certainly never again relay on any mainstream media for my information, on anything. I have, for all my formative news-reading years, relied on the Internet as a source of information. Poor as it is, it has served me better than any official publication. And it has served others in the same way. Others from my generation and probably from two others.

A demographic spanning some 20 years for whom newspapers, raid and television have been, are and will always be and unreliable sources of information. This is not some problem for young "pinkos" or anarchists who will turn to the Village Magazine or Indymedia or what have you for their news. No. The problems in the contemporary media are so deep, so systemic, and so pervasive across the entire political spectrum of the industry, that the young readers who have had to put up with them will never again turn to any outlet proclaiming itself to be an official or unofficial source of news. For them, journalism is a disreputable occupation, and anyone claiming to be one will always be suspect. They turn instead to the bloggers, and nobodies, and part time commentators. People untainted by a corrupt occupation or ind

Re:If you don't want people looking at it

[Eldragon]

I completely agree. I have gotten into the habit of counting the number of articles in my local paper written by local reporters, it averages out to about 5. All the other articles are from the AP wire, and I had gotten that news on the internet the day before.

I would much rather have my local paper ditch the wire services completely and fill that space with nothing but local/regional news. Even if that means they only deliver the paper 4 days a week.

Re:If you don't want people looking at it

[NeutronCowboy]

Then I would suggest expanding your news gathering. BBC, NPR, CNN and NYT all have excellent pieces of investigative journalism. Is everything on their sites or in their papers solid, investigative journalism? Of course not. But to say "virtually everything is fluff news" betrays more your lack of reading than a lack of good journalism.

Re:If you don't want people looking at it

[Locklin]

CNN.com's Latest news:
* Italy earthquake toll hits 207
      Government press release
* F-16s chase stolen plane to Missouri
      Police press release
* Missing girl found dead in submerged luggage
      Police press release
* Suspected shooter's letter: 'Have a nice day'
      Police press release
* Commentary: What Turkey can do for the U.S.
      Commentary
* CNNMoney: Recovery hopes begin to blossom
      Interview with banker
* Honors student leaves work, disappears
      Police press release
* FBI suspects truckers in serial killings Video
      FBI press release
* Time: Why are army recruiters dying?
      Okay, published article but by Time Magazine
* Commentary: How to make your poor life richer
      Commentary
* iReport.com: Rabbit rescued from floodwaters
        Fluff

There's nothing here that the blogger "echo chamber" couldn't pick up on, certainly nothing that fundamentally needs leg-work. The Time magazine piece is worthwhile, so maybe subscribe to Time, but not CNN as a daily source of news.

Re:If you don't want people looking at it

[Archangel Michael]

With the advent of mass media (TV, Cable, and now Internet) a good investigative journalist only gets one story. After that, if it was a good or excellent story, then they are doomed to fame, which will prevent any further investigative reports.

The problem is that fame breeds the inability to gather information quietly, and sources confidential, both of which are needed for good investigations.

But there is even bigger problem with investigative journalism in general. This problem is called MONEY. It takes a great deal of money to do a good investigation. Combine this with the previously mentioned problem and you can see the real problem. Unknown investigative journalists get no momey to investigate anything. So they have to practically starve while running the investigation.

Then you have the cases like that of Dan Rather who do investigative pieces, who don't investigate any of the sources and defend the conclusions of the piece even when the evidence is shown to be fabricated. We call this "Liberal Bias" most of the time, unless Fox News is involved, then we call it Faux News.

Re:If you don't want people looking at it

[JWSmythe]

    The unfortunate downside to that is, local news is usually boring. In traveling around the US and Canada, watching the local news is amazingly boring. The "best" parts are frequently the fluff pieces.

    "Local firefighters saved 56 kitties from trees this month"

    "Martha's Pancake house goes for world record flapjack"

    With some luck, something exciting will have happened, and they always stretch it out. On broadcast news, they announce it at the beginning, repeat the fact that it's coming up throughout the broadcast, and finally do the 30 second spot just before the end.

    For quite a few years now, local news that would be remotely interesting has made national news (via wire services, of course), so even when I've gone to a new city, I was already caught up. Sometimes I will have read it first online, so by the time it makes print or radio, it's already old news.

    I have a story up in my office, clipped out of a local tabliod.

    It's this photo (from AP, of course). At least our local headline was better than average. "Can't help but notice the cig still in his mouth" :) The text on my print copy is the same as on the story with the link.

Re:If you don't want people looking at it

[FooRat]

While I loathe your reflex to call for a 'new law' (ugh) to protect the industry, the problem you point out is a simple economic one: It used to be that information *distribution* was naturally scarce, so newspapers could cover the costs of investigative work by charging for information distribution. In the Internet era, the cost of the actual distribution of information will virtually approach zero. But it still costs the same to do the legwork.

Basically: *distribution* has little value, but *investigation* still does, and always will have value. Nobody *should* be making more lots of money for distributing information when technology allows it to cost so little - artificially protecting that would just be protectionist welfare and damaging to everyone.

You are suggesting that nobody would be able to pay investigators if they couldn't charge for distribution. This simply isn't true. Since investigation has value, people won't mind paying to obtain its results in one way or another; if investigators disappeared, people would freak out, and a gap in the market would appear. This could be solved in many ways - for example, a company like Google could make use of advertising to subsidize investigators.

Don't be so scared that we're going to run out of news. It will naturally have value, because people will naturally demand it. No need to call government to help. Governments are absolutely the last people you want to trust with controlling impartial investigation!

Wither into irrelevence.

[Pig Hogger]

Sure. They can cut themselves from the "Intaweb"... They'll just wither and die without any traffic.

Go ahead, AP! Cut yourself off and fall more into irrelevence... The suits just don't understand that traffic is the new black.

Re:Wither into irrelevence.

[interkin3tic]

The suits just don't understand that traffic is the new black.

No, black is still black. How many sites get tons of hits but no actual profits?

AP may be hurting themselves by doing this, or they may have, you know, actually studied their own buisness and concluded that this is how they will survive. We'll get to see for ourselves. Or not, since if they go under, who is going to report it? AP news?

Re:Wither into irrelevence.

[russotto]

AP may be hurting themselves by doing this, or they may have, you know, actually studied their own buisness and concluded that this is how they will survive.

From the article:

The policies were adopted by the A.P. board, composed mostly of newspaper industry executives.

I think we can discount the second option.

Re:Wither into irrelevence.

[haystor]

Yea, they should have surveyed the slashdot pundits instead.

Re:Wither into irrelevence.

[jc42]

How many sites get tons of hits but no actual profits?

Ooh, ooh; I know! That would be my web site!

Actually, I'm more or less in charge of several web sites for several small organizations whose names or activities aren't very relevant here, because they're typical of zillions of orgs with an online presence. I fell into this because I understand how the Internet works, and most of the people in the organizations don't (and don't want to). They just want to type up their stories, and let the electronic magic be handled by someone else.

What's interesting about this to me is that it presents an interesting scenario: Suppose one of my sites has the same information as an AP news story about the site or the organization behind it. It sounds like, when we report the same news about ourselves, we would be in violation of AP's ownership of that information. So we could be sued by AP for reporting information about ourselves that AP has found, slightly reworded, and reported.

This situation isn't hypothetical. AP has had local news stories about some of these organizations. They may have got the information via interviews, or they may have got it from the orgs' blogs; we really don't know. In the past, we've provided the information, because people in organizations often want their activities to be publicised.

What we're wondering is: If we blog about our activities, and AP picks up the info and reports it, are they saying that we have to pay AP to have the same information on our own web site? If we've blogged about it and AP reports it, is AP saying that we must remove the information from our blogs?

It sure sounds like this is what they're aiming for.

This was an unlikely scenario back in the days of printed news, or even with broadcast news, since the news creators were rarely in a position to do the distribution, printing or delivery of the news. But the Internet has ended this division. News creators can now simply type up a few sentences and hand them over to their web server. Distribution and delivery to readers is handled by the web server without further human activity (or the death of trees ;-). Readers get the info from the original sources if they want. We can cross-link our sites to help people with similar interests find what they want. Google can help people find the right articles on our sites.

So are we really going to give the big news corporations complete ownership over all information about our organizations, to (mis)report as they see fit? Or can we little guys continue to report our own activities on our own web sites without harrassment from the news corporations' lawyers?

Easy steps

[Thanshin]

1 - Tell someone a story.
2 - Wait till he tells the same story to someone else.
3 - Sue.

A great plan indeed. I can't foresee any way it may fail.

Re:Easy steps

[eldavojohn]

1 - Tell someone a story. 2 - Wait till he tells the same story to someone else. 3 - Sue.

A great plan indeed. I can't foresee any way it may fail.

I think it's kind of different. They are gaining revenue for telling the story. And it's not fictional ... and they will be held accountable if they get some facts wrong. And also that's how they make their money.

A more accurate analogy (though still flawed) would be:
1 - Do a lot of footwork to find the facts and tell them to someone to make a tiny sum of money.
2 - Wait till he tells the same story to 10,000 other people with your exact words and little to no attribution to you and he makes a nominal sum of money.
3 - Sue.

Not really a plan, as step 2 requires action on someone else's part. Hey, I don't predict this to fail the way the MPAA/RIAA are being backed by congress and the courts. Legal or legislative action is at the AP's disposal.

Re:Easy steps

[elrous0]

1) Refuse to let Google and other search engines index your stories
2) Google removes all newspapers with AP content from its indexing
3) Newspapers, with falling print sales and no Google presence, go out of business
4) No one left to buy AP stories
5) ???
6) Profit!

Legislative remedies? Yuck.

[tepples]

AP wrote:

and will seek legal and legislative remedies against those who don't.

"Legal remedies" == we'll sue; easy enough. But what worries most is "legislative remedies". It reeks of "We know you're playing by the rules, but we don't like the rules, so we'll buy off a few senators to get the rules changed."

My 22 pence worth

[flyingfsck]

My website generates about 44 cents in Google revenue per day. The newspapers of the world are in for a surprise.

Robots.txt doesn't work?

[forand]

This is very confusing to me. If websites don't want aggregators to compile all of their content for them and place it in a convenient (for the viewer) format and location then they should just make their robots.txt act accordingly.

Unfortunately this appears to be a money grab and if there was and doubt in my mind about that it was removed when they stated '[we] will seek legal and legislative remedies against those who don't [license].' Making new laws to maintain your revenue stream is a clear sign to me that you do not have a viable business model and are attempting to make things criminal without a valid reason.

Re:Robots.txt doesn't work?

[CopaceticOpus]

Yes, but the big sites they're going after like Google and Yahoo will respect robots.txt. (If they don't, now that would be a story.)

Google isn't stealing their articles. They are linking to their articles, with maybe a snippet quoted which falls under fair use.

The trouble is that the AP wants it both ways. They don't want to exclude themselves from Google's traditional search results. And yet, they want to block Google from compiling search results about recent news into a single, useful page.

Aggregator Aggro

[commandlinegamer]

It wouldn't surprise if 90% of web sites are just aggregators. I'd be more than happy if they withered and died. Here's a tip - if you don't have [your own] content you don't have a website. I'm all for the Web - it gives people the freedom to publish their own damn nonsense, I just can't stand the amount of duplication you need to search through these days to find anything, be it news, software or tasteful pictures of Reese Witherspoon's chin (she could always double up as a snow plough if times get tough in the acting business).

Re:Aggregator Aggro

[Anonymous Coward]

I would point out that Slashdot is an Aggregator with comment posting. It generates no actual news stories itself.

Re:Aggregator Aggro

[commandlinegamer]

You must be new here..you didn't expect me to realise the full implications of my own posting did you?

Learning from the mistakes of others

[flaming error]

It is rather amazing that right after the RIAA experiemce proves that this is a spectacularly bad idea, the AP dusts it off and tries it on. Don't these guys read the news?

Link to the original article

[Bearhouse]

[censored]

SO no RSS feeds then?

[foniksonik]

So if I were to set up a website that let people put rss feeds of their choice on a portal page - and then added advertising of my own to that same page - and the user decided to choose one of these:

RSS Feeds

I'd be open to a lawsuit?

What if I then created a link that said "Get all the Associated Press RSS feeds" which then did the copy/paste for the user and created a page for them of all the above feeds?

Then based on user activity I found that every user (99.5%) was clicking that auto-AP button... so to provide good customer service I just added tabs to my interface with one of them being "AP News" by default.

All this while, the pages only show the Title, summary, attribution, date and a link to the original article.

So then I get sued... right?

What if I just made "widgets" that people could download to their Widget product of choice? How about a desktop application that does the same thing - ad free - but has a purchase price attached?

Any thoughts?

My current Mail program allows me to consume RSS feeds, as do a variety of widgets (online and off) and none of them are non-commercial and I'm fairly certain that none of them are paying the AP any license fee.

Re:SO no RSS feeds then?

[digitalhermit]

It works more like this:

Someone creates some content for a website. Their revenue is based on the number of people visiting the site.

Someone else comes along and aggregates multiple websites. Instead of people visiting the original site, they start to visit the aggregator because it's more convenient. The aggregator gets the views and the advertising money.

The content creators lose out, even though they create the content.

The argument from the aggregator site is that it pushes viewers to sites that they would never normally visit. E.g., a person in Florida may never read an Oklahoma newspaper unless there was a link somewhere on an aggregator.

Sometimes it balances out, but more and more, it's in favor of the aggregator.

I think eventually content will be separated from the presentation. Companies like the AP, like the local Herald, will switch from providing a newspaper or website into providing a standard feed, and charging based on that feed. This is very similar to how other media is shopped around.

There's a danger in that news will also become indistinguishable from entertainment (it's almost there already), but that may be the only way the newspapers can survive.

Re:Why didn't they adapt?

[Attila Dimedici]

Why did so many big companies get caught out by the internet? They had the capital, and the human resources to do something, but they just sat there and let it hit them with full force.

It wasn't like it crept up on them overnight!

It is really simple, under the companies' pre-Internet business model they made $X. Under every Internet business model anyone could come up with they would make at best $.0X. They continued using the pre-Internet business model as long as they could, hoping that someone would come up with an Internet business model that would allow them to make $X. It hasn't happened.
These companies that got caught out by the Internet are in businesses that just don't have the potential to make the kind of money they are used to in the Internet age.
These businesses used to have high barriers to entry. The Internet eliminated those barriers to entry.

flawed by design

[Demonantis]

The internet was not built with bussiness models in mind. Unfortunately, businesses think they can shoehorn a model onto the interenet.

Are you really that stupid

[wiredog]

They do want people looking at, they just want to be paid for their work. You know:

"Information wants to be free, but information purveyors want to be paid."

Otherwise they can go out of business, and then where will you get your information?

Re:Are you really that stupid

[MightyYar]

That doesn't make him stupid. He pointed out something very obvious - once information is out there, you have to exert a lot of effort to bottle it back up. In the old days, it was relatively easy to find out who was filching your information - now it can be hard to find out even what country someone is in, let alone who they are.

Does this mean the end for the AP? Maybe. Does this mean the end of news? I doubt it. Look at NPR and the BBC, for example. While relying on government or non-profits for news may bring its own issues, I seriously doubt that the information will cease to be generated.

Re:Are you really that stupid

[0xygen]

Who's republishing your comments?

Hmm, no-one, because they have a near trivial value?

If someone is republishing your entire output, it has value to them.

Slashdot stories might have made a better argument - but they are "paid for" by the site link the submitter gets.

Re:Are you really that stupid

[Mr_eX9]

Otherwise they can go out of business, and then where will you get your information?

From somebody else who knows how to purvey information and still make a buck? Just a hunch.

To hell with the AP if they're going to go the route of the RIAA.

Re:Are you really that stupid

[Elrond, Duke of URL]

Hmmm... I think it's a little more than that. At least, they're specifically picking on Google in the summary's synopsis of the article. And why?

When I look at Google News, I see a page of links, the titles of which are almost entirely just headlines. The few that aren't just headlines include only a sentence or two from the article. How is this not fair use? And how is the AP entitled to any compensation for this? If you truly want to know more, you'll click on a link and, if it's an AP story, be sent to an AP website where you will get both the full article and the AP's ads.

For site's which don't play nice, ripping whole articles or outright plagiarism, then go ahead, bring down the hammer. But that's not a new problem. This, on the other hand, sounds an awful lot like the AP going for a money grab while waving a big lawyer stick. And what's worse is that they might succeed because the courts have time and again shown questionable judgment when it comes to cases involving linking and fair use.

Re:Are you really that stupid

[coryking]

The problem is a bit more complex, I think:

1) That AP article is not just on nytimes.com, but a lot of other news sites also aggregated by Google.
2) AP, nor those who syndicate it, have control over how or where their content is placed on Google. They only get to say "here is my newsfeed, have fun".
3) Because of #2, if you have 40 newspapers who bought an AP article but only nytimes gets listed on the "front page" of google news, the other newspapers aren't getting any ROI on their purchase.
4) Ponies.

but they sure got paid for what happened.

Sure, in the short-run they did. But the problem with AP is they too are basically a twisted form of a news-aggregates. They aggregate news stories and sell it to a hundred newspapers who print said stories and generate revenue by selling ads next to the story. Nowdays, those newspapers are aggregated by Google, who aggregates the newspapers in such a way that only a few of the newspapers displaying that article get any traffic in which to sell ads to.

In other words, maybe AP should cut the middle man and just sell to Google.

Re:Are you really that stupid

[Dupple]

The BBC is not paid for by tax. It's paid for by a license.

The BBC is wholly independent of and separate from the British tax system

AP Killed Printed News

[Thelasko]

The reason you hear stories about newspapers failing all over the country is because of the Associated Press. In order to cut costs, newspapers across the country eliminated most of their reporting staff and replaced them with AP newsfeeds. Instead of doing real reporting, they just "rip and read" from the AP feed.

The advent of the internet has given us access to many more news sources than we ever had before. Most of us have realized that all of the news papers have the same stories, word for word. This is why they are going out of business. If newspapers, and other news sources, are going to stay in business, they need to provide valuable content. They need to stop relying on the AP for content, we can get that anywhere.

Calling all Slashdot Geniuses

[jgalun]

So far, as expected, every comment is about how stupid these old media dinosaurs are to repeat the mistakes of the RIAA/MPAA.

Let me ask a question. If the newspapers that create the AP content are going out of business, where will the content come from? And if everyone simply copies the AP articles without paying for it, where will the revenue stream come from to pay the writers?

I know, I know, everything on the Internet is a commodity now. But tell me - what happens when there is no one left to produce that commodity?

At some point the Slashdot crowd is going to have to face up to the fact that content producers need to get paid if they are going to continue producing. Just like movies - it's easy to criticize the MPAA, but who is going to pay the millions of dollars to shoot a major movie if everyone simply copies content without paying for it?

Re:Calling all Slashdot Geniuses

[whiledo]

Just like movies - it's easy to criticize the MPAA, but who is going to pay the millions of dollars to shoot a major movie if everyone simply copies content without paying for it?

I was agreeing with you up until this point.

Most people's problems with the MPAA has been with their willingness to fight technology rather than embrace it, often by using the laws they have paid to have put in place. They strive to not even try new methods of movie delivery, such as releasing a film at the same time on PPV as in theaters, easy non-DRM encumbered downloads for a less than a rental, etc. These other methods might fail, but the MPAA (or the studios that make it up) haven't even really experimented in these areas.

I know you didn't bring it up, but the RIAA is another example. Not only do you have the abusive legal stuff, but you have the fact that they are really just a layer of lawyers, managers and distributors that are no longer as crucial to their industry as they once were. They have done more to try releasing their content in new ways, but they still only do it begrudgingly and so they wind up shooting themselves in the foot. For example, the whole fact that for all these years, the only way to legally purchase music from a lot of popular artists was to buy into the whole iTunes+DRM bullshit. They only wanted to shift their business model if it would still give all the useless people the same fat paychecks as they had always gotten, without paying the actual content creators a nickel more.

Re:Calling all Slashdot Geniuses

[PhxBlue]

And if everyone simply copies the AP articles without paying for it, where will the revenue stream come from to pay the writers?

This is a strawman. No one's advocating the practice of copying and pasting entire AP articles. Read the fscking article (or at least the summary) -- the AP is talking about demanding fees for Web sites who link to their stories or copy and paste excerpts with links to the full stories.

I know, I know, everything on the Internet is a commodity now. But tell me - what happens when there is no one left to produce that commodity?

Traditional journalists look down upon bloggers, but sometimes the only difference is that one group uses the Associated Press Stylebook and the other doesn't. I think you'll discover that if "traditional" newspapers go away, communities will step in to fill the void.

Re:Calling all Slashdot Geniuses

[Anonymous Coward]

Why, blog journalists, of course. Am I joking or am I serious? What would be the result of a shift of this nature? Discuss...

This was a mistake on jgalun's part, underestimating the massive blogger population who are prepared, on a moment's notice, to fly all over the planet to get stories and report on them to the satisfaction of the trapped-in-the-90s pop culture junkies that read their blogs. Massive amounts of bloggers do this. All the time. And they never ever ever ever just sit on their asses, slurp down news from the AP or other reporting companies, and just bitch and whine about them. Never. Nuh-uh.

Because as we all know, there's an equal number of bloggers willing to sit in on senate hearings about the minutiae of budget reform and can fly out to war zones to get FIRST-HAND information on the injustices carried out by the armed forces on all sides as there are bloggers willing to do HARD HITTING REPORTING on some obscure manga artist, some cartoon series from the 80s and 90s that died with good reason, or zomg flying out to Comic-Con to booze and schmooze with people who think the exact same thing they do.

"Yesterday some crazy guy off in East Korea or wherever launched a missile. But I've got a bunch of new figurines from my favorite anime!!!1! They're the same as the old ones I had, just different sizes!"

Welcome to the future of hard-hitting reporting.

Re:Calling all Slashdot Geniuses

[igaborf]

The problem is not that they are repeating the RIAA/MPAA approach. The problem is that they did exactly the opposite. Instead of protecting their content, they are giving it away. Even the AP: I have a free app on my iPhone from the AP that gives me the AP news feed. Newspapers wanted to get ahead of the digital revolution, so they put their product on-line. Some tried to charge for it, but there were enough who put it up for free that the for-charge plans failed. So they are stuck trying to make it work economically with on-line advertising.

The future of newspapers is dim. Soon, the only ones "reporting" news will be companies that are operating in other media: CNN, Fox etc. Ancillary, low-profit news media such as print and the Web will exist only as add-ons to the profit-making operations to "build the brand." Here in Hartford, for example, the sole daily newspaper, the Hartford Courant, recently announced that its newsroom operations were being combined with that of the co-owned Channel 61 station -- with the TV news director becoming the publisher of the newspaper. That's the model we're heading toward.

Re:Calling all Slashdot Geniuses

[abigor]

So you're saying we need a site like Gizmodo to report on the border regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan, or to analyse Australian foreign policy from the perspective of the EU member nations?

Gizmodo and Engadget cover relatively trivial consumer products. That's not what the Associated Press does, kid. Get a clue.

Almost sad

[dwhitaker]

It is almost sad to see the professional journalism dying - or at least having the traditional roles it took in society go the way of the dinosaurs. 15 years from now, the news market will be a much different place, and I hope we figure out a way to have integrity and accountability in the new model. I do find it odd though that some industries who fail to adapt get government funds while others, who could arguably provide a public service, are left out to dry.

Don't these guys read the news?

[bobbuck]

Yes, but just the AP.

Re:Why didn't they adapt?

[DeweyQ]

Google struggled to come up with a business model too. Now that their revenue is through the roof, people point to them and say: "Well that's obvious." Bold experimentation or visionary stubbornness is needed to latch onto a business model that WILL work in the Internet age. True, the Internet didn't creep up on them overnight, but a sea change can stretch on for years. Clay Shirky's article on this point makes sense to me: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/

AP Is Pricing Itself Out Of the Blog Market

[ausoleil]

I work on a popular sports blog and also another up and coming blog, and both feature commentary on relevant news (college sports and golf.)

We would love to use AP content for our blogs, with proper uasge, citations, trackbacks and the like. So we try to contact AP for licensing information and cannot reach a human and get no call back for weeks.

When they do return our inquiries, they gave us a price so ridiculous that it was impossible to fit it into any workable revenue model. It's not that we are cheap or expected something for nothing, it's just that they wanted a fee so high that it just couldn't be done.

We came away with a definite impression that AP didn't *want* to work with us and that their numbers were just go-away-leave-us-alone figures that they knew they had little chance of getting a sale from.

Now we avoid their material like the plague.

Re:AP Is Pricing Itself Out Of the Blog Market

[phantomcircuit]

They're giving you the price it costs to pay the human cost (salaries, benefits, travel costs) of reporting the news you say you want to give your readers. It's not cheap.

It is cheap when they're selling the exact same information to every newspaper on the planet...

Re:Why didn't they adapt?

[digitig]

AP's barrier to entry wasn't distribution, it was a worldwide network of skilled journalists. The Internet hasn't removed that barrier to entry, because bloggers on the ground don't have the detachment and big-picture view of the skilled journalist, and rarely have the writing skills. If anything is damaging AP's business model, it's not the barriers to entry, it's whether the product (informed, well written journalism) is in demand nowadays.

its more than sad, its scary

[circletimessquare]

a free press is integral to the functioning of a modern democracy. hell, the printing press gave birth to the foment of ideas and individuals who created modern democracy. without a free press, those in power feel at ease to engage in shenanigans while no one is watching. the free press is the light that sends those cockroaches scurrying. with no free press watching, the cockroaches do their thing, and rot our social institutions

but its not like a free press is under attack from some callow ideology working against democracy, the free press is simply losing its economic lifeblood and fading away. and its losing it from a technological innovation that everyone thinks is an even better fountain for the free exchange of ideas

except this new medium has no economic underpinnings. such that there is no structure to it, there is no scarcity of resources that forces it into limited models that are small in number and easy to constrain to trust and impartiality. instead, on the internet, we get rumor, lies, fearmongering, propaganda, spread with the same reach as old school media but beholden to nothing or no one, certainly not any standard of behavior, and costing absolutely nothing to run

so what gives? is the internet, supposed great leap forward in the exchange of ideas, actually the death knell of good ideas, by drowning it in a sea of mediocrity and lies?

Lopsided Fight.....

[IHC Navistar]

This is going to backfire BIG TIME.

Piss off search engines badly enough by demanding that they pay you for listing your articles on a search will simply result in search engines NOT displaying sites that have the articles.

Search engines have multiple avenues of generating revenue, and will always have business, since they are generally the 'Starting Point' for internet activity, and are *very* well-known throughout the world. News sites, however, require that you know their url *exactly* if you want to view their site without having to use a search engine.

AP is trying to start a fight that it cannot possibly hope to win, and is on its way from reporting the news, to BEING the news. Google and other search engines have AP by the short hairs, and I don't forsee them playing nice on this one.

Re:Why can't we all get along?

[DeweyQ]

Two points:

1. Newspapers, despite their name, have for years not been primarily about reporting "hard" news -- painstakingly gathered from "reporters on the ground". They are about building community and engaging the reader for advertising purposes. (Note how lifestyle, entertainment, reviews, editorial, and even classifieds far outweigh the news sections of most newspapers.)
2. Like radio, the consumers of the content in newspapers don't really pay the bills. Subscriptions fees were primarily designed as a way to measure engaged readers. The newspaper can tell their advertisers that they have X number of readers engaged enough to pay for the content. With the Web, metrics can be done far more accurately... and the content providers can tell the advertisers exactly how many people visited a specific article.

Given these two historical points -- as well as the tendency towards zero marginal cost for reproduction and distribution of digital content, I personally don't think micropayments make sense.

Well, maybe they should!

[coryking]

I like to visit "real" newspaper sites that have good discussion systems. Almost all of the local newspapers in Seattle have horrible comment systems that are tucked a way in such a fashion that only real nutcases seem to inhabit them.

Worse, they all seem to use digg-style "up/down" moderation. "Up/Down" moderation is horrible for anything outside product reviews. It creates a feedback loop where those that go with the group think get rewarded with "+55" and those who go against get shunned at "-11" with no way to get out of the hole.

Slashdot may not be perfect, but after using dozens if not hundreds of other discussion systems, they do have pretty much the best out there. DailyKos is close second, but only because a limited set of users can down-rate a comment and even those users can only dish out a couple down-rates a day. Anything that grants regular users the ability to make an unlimited number of down-rates will quickly turn into a cesspool of wackos.

So yeah, newspaper sites could learn a thing or two by ripping some of what slashdot does right. Slashdot could do the same and finally add a rich text editor to the comments so I can finally highlight a string of words and make it a link...but that is a different story :-)

What profit?

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

I think they'd probably prefer not to, they'd prefer to go back to simpler times, before this damn internet thing, when they were still making money hand over fist.

Um, the AP isn't really run for profit, silly. It's a cooperative of news organizations that exists to allow its members to share stories, so the papers can publish stories about regions where they don't have reporters. All of the AP's valuable content is supplied by the members. In effect, the AP and the other news agencies are the first news aggregators.

There is plenty of legwork being done by bloggers

[sean.peters]

At least at the national level. See http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/ for an example - it started off as a single blogger who actually dug for news. Now it's up to about a dozen people, and they do a really good job of reporting.

The problem, in my view, is LOCAL news. There's no one who's really filling the role of the local paper in holding the local politicos accountable. It used to be that the county board had to tread at least a little bit lightly when cutting crooked deals with real estate developers, for example... because they couldn't discount the possibility that the County Post was checking up on what was going on. But now the County Post only publishes online, and only AP stories and blogs. There's really very little local reporting going on any more.