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It's becoming more and more and more clear that the Associated Press does not like the rules of the Internet and intends to resist them. That's actually pretty predictable when you think about it, because the Internet doesn't like the AP either.
More specifically, the Internet has no place for the AP. The roles that AP played in the print media system are either unnecessary (generic wire service coverage) or downright harmful (redistributing member content) in the digital system.
The AP evolved as a cooperative of newspapers, as well as some radio and TV stations, to solve two specific problems of the pre-Internet era:
1) How does a local newspaper, with no national or international bureaus, fulfill its mission to digest daily all the world's happenings? Answer: form a cooperative, AP, where everyone shares the cost of staffing bureaus and shares in the content.
But on the Internet, that model is of little use. Online news sites succeed by focusing on one niche and creating their own unique value in covering the hell out of that niche, better than anyone else. You don't need AP content on a news website. Cover what you cover. Users will go to CNN, BBC or the like for the national/international news anyway.
2) How does a network of newspapers share important stories among each other so they may all reprint them? Answer: permit AP editors to copy or rewrite your content and send it over a wire (an actual telegraph "wire" in the early days) to other AP members. Because newspapers generally didn't compete across geographic markets, there was no harm to letting others reprint your work elsewhere, and you benefited from theirs.
On the Internet, of course, the opposite is true. We're all in one big market now, with everyone just a link away from any piece of information in the world. There is no need for a "wire" to send copies of stories around anymore, when one site can simply link to the original story on the other site.
More importantly, the wire copying causes much harm. The AP takes the unique value provided by the original site and dilutes it by making the product free for thousands of other outlets to repost, instead of sending all the traffic back to the site that created the valuable thing in the first place. The AP is the "parasitic aggregator" that it and others so often label other blogs and news sites.
So the AP's two reasons for existence don't hold up online. The AP senses this, and its leadership is going through the Kubler-Ross stages of grief (moving from Denial to Anger now, Bargaining will be next when more members start to cancel). We don't need an AP online (which is why it's laughable that AP thinks we all will be willing to license their content and pay for it).
You do your thing, I'll do mine, and we'll link to each other. No wires.
7/25/09
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6 comments:
I think the newspapers of the future are going to be hologram-like; the projector will be smaller than an iPod; won't need Internet; can read as projected text OR holographic images (can be scary - think of what goes on in this world); advertisers will make ads FUN ... what do you think? Newspapers should jump on this now.
Something like this is probable. In general, I think the Internet will travel with us everywhere in the near future and our interaction with the physical world will be augmented by technology, be it hologram, data overlays, etc.
Here is an earlier post on the subject.
Great way to break down what the AP does.
Just to play devil's advocate, and argue for how the AP can be saved:
1) National reporting The AP ought to focus a lot of energy on becoming a destination site in it's own right. Instead of getting their stories reprinted by other outlets, drive traffic to ap.org.
2) Aggregation Instead of rewriting copy (which is now useless), focus of curation. The AP has, for a long time picked the best stories from across the nation. Leverage that ability to make an unstoppable, human edited aggregator that beats the pants of Google News with custom written summaries and localized, personalized layout.
I find myself arguing for something odd: the AP ought to transition away from being a platform, and toward being a destination site.
I suppose they'll still be a platform for newsorgs, but for the end-user (who rarely ever thought about the AP or even knows what it is), the AP can/should take a much more dominant roll.
Those are good points, JBaker. An organization playing those roles could succeed.
However, the problem for AP is that it is a cooperative funded by newspapers. So the newspapers have no interest in paying AP to build up its own ap.org.
Perhaps it could shift from a duplicating wire service to a curation service that helps news sites find the important outside stories to summarize and link to.
Thank your for your interesting post. AP's approach to kill internet linking as we know it is not unique to the U.S., unfortunately.
News media and bureaus care for themselves. They want people to read their stories, and if their competitor has a better story on the same topic, they'd rather borrow (read: steal) the story and make their own version. I don't rely on a single local online news media to bring me all the stories from the area I live in (Western Norway). I have to check them all. This takes time. It's the same with national news media online, as well as international niche media.
And theres another thing: Media that only cares for themselves (and not their readers) mess up the RSS-feeds. I describe the problem in my blog post Let's dig out the lost news in the Long Tail, because today I started a project on full time in my company Mediebruket to do something about this. The working title is as.long.as.
I believe we need services on the web that saves a lot of time for us, like the newspaper did before radio, TV and internet.
In my opinion, the only way to this properly, is to put journalistic principles to work in the filtration process. We can't leave it all to the machines.
Feel free to join the mission!
In case you missed it, The AP DRM distribution scheme http://imgur.com/DzZdf.jpg
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