Deep Currents

In the latest news about news, the Associated Press just announced a new project: charging everyone for its content. You might wonder why they didn’t before, but take a moment to think about all those places you find news on the Internet, not only in news aggregators such as Google News, Yahoo News, and the Huffington Post, but also in countless blogs. The former pay the AP a tidy sum (thanks Kaizar for the correction), but the blogosphere doesn’t, even though A-list bloggers gather a lot of eyeballs and garner a decent amount of ad revenue. Using AP headlines and story snippets is legal under the doctrine of “fair use,” or so they argue, though they haven’t had to test out that idea in court. Now the AP is arguing that the current circumstances (read: the fast-arriving death of the newspaper industry) are good enough reason for the sharing of their content under “fair use” (now labeled a “misguided legal theory”) to convert to a new arrangement that will pay the AP its “fair share.” They haven’t worked out the details just yet, but their stated intention is to demand revenue-sharing agreements from aggregators in the very near future. If the bloggers won’t cough up, the AP will sue. Watch this space. (Update: more details here from Search Engine Watch.)

What will this actually mean? Will they charge for search engine listings? Will they require payment from everyone, or just those that make ad revenue?  Will software be effective at tracking down the majority of the AP content? All of these questions will make a big difference but are unanswered as yet. The AP’s goal is simply to generate revenue for itself and the many newspapers that are part of its cooperative, so it would make the most sense for them to target the cash cows of Google and Yahoo’s ad services and the sites who make money from them. I first saw this story today when my friend Kaizar at NewsTrust tweeted today that he was worried the AP might sue them out of existence, which is a reasonable concern since the New York Times reported that “the A.P. will also pursue sites that reproduce large parts of articles, rather than using brief links.” Perhaps NewsTrust could simply link to the stories and avoid paying a fee. But NewsTrust does not make money off of ads and is also a nonprofit, so perhaps they’re in the clear.

It’s worth asking how we ended up in the strange situation where an association of the world’s major newspapers gives away its content for free to outlets that compete head to head with the newspapers themselves for attention online. A wonderfully long and thoughtful answer to that question is spelled out in the latest American Journalism Review under the title “A Costly Mistake?” It turns out that the AP made the decision to provide its content online back in 1998, and the author finds a wide range of opinions that characterize that choice in terms ranging from the sympathetic to the vitriolic. The AP themselves justify the choice in terms of its need to compete with Reuters and Agence France Presse, which would be a valid argument except that those services have never had the resources of the AP’s 3,000 reporters who cover the globe and reach half of its inhabitants. Assigning the blame gets even foggier when you account for the fact that newspapers themselves started giving away content around the same time and continued the practice after early failures to charge. The result: many of today’s biggest attractors of eyeballs in the news business are not the news organizations who created the content but the tech companies who index it and the filters who cater to a niche audience.

Then again, Internet advertising is dead anyways, according to a much-discussed post on TechCrunch. Perhaps the AP will find itself milking a dead cow.

Written: April 8th, 2009