June 17, 2008

Heaton: AP Exposes Its Growing Irrelevance With Attack on Bloggers

Terry Heaton gets to the heart of the problem facing the Associated Press in its battle with the blogosphere...

The real problem for the A.P. is that it can’t win this argument, and by pressing the issue, they’re very likely to end up with a business model that dies overnight. And I don’t think I’m overstating that. Links are the currency of the Web, and the A.P. hard line spits in the face of that, which is leading to boycotts like Arrington’s. The monopoly co-operative is living in the past, but it needs that past to validate a business model that is as out-of-date as traditional media itself. Now, by pressing the matter, they run the significant risk of being in a contrary legal position, and what will be left for them after that?

They’ve announced that they’re willing to create a new policy, but that, too, is fraught with problems, for it can only shed further light on the weakness of their business model in a changing environment. Bloggers know that links go to the originator of the content, which would mean linking to the A.P.’s members, not the A.P. version thereof. When that happens, media companies will rightly ask why they need an expensive middle man in the equation. Always remember that the Web disrupts the middle of any transaction, including media. As such, the most enviable position in the new world is that of aggregator, but as Google News proves, there’s not exactly a whole lot of money to be made in so doing.

An increasingly large chunk of what the AP does for money is being rendered obsolete by cheap interactive digital technology.

Here's a question: If all of the member newspapers of the AP are online (and, indeed, most if not all are), why do they need the AP to pay to move a story from, say, The Tennessean to the Knoxville paper, rewriting it a bit en route?

Why can't newspapers form a cooperative without a middleman, and just share each other's stuff? Why do they need AP editors to take a story from one paper, edit it into the AP's bland style, and send it to them over a wire? Why could newspapers simply form a content cooperative in which a paper like, say, the Knoxville paper, could simply republish stories from The Tennessean (and vice versa) and pay the original source paper for the content?

Indeed, multi-newspaper conglomerates already share content within the chain that way. Is there any reason they could not create online systems to share content across multiple newspaper chains? There are so few markets where there is any meaningful competition between two or more newspaper companies. The Knoxville, Memphis, Chattanooga and Nashville dailies do not compete with each other in a business sense, no matter how much the state capital reporters from each still view their job as being to scoop their rival on the big story.

So, why doesn't the Tennessee Press Association operate a web-accessible database of news stories - all stories and photos - from all TPA member papers, and allow any TPA member to republish those stories by paying the originating newspaper a fee? The database would replace the AP as the middleman - at much lower cost to the member newspapers.