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As newspaper continue to founder and fail, the clear benefit of Google especially — to direct hordes of traffic back to the original site — is increasingly blurred by the anger and envy of newspaper executives over Google's ability to monetize aggregation at all while paying nothing towards content creation.It has become virtually a populist notion among many in the industry that aggregators who scrape a headline and a paragraph are taking something of value, if not outright stealing, and not operating under a fair use exception even if they drive traffic to the source.
These two paragraphs sound quite misguided in my opinion.
First: "over Google's ability to monetize aggregation", I personally don't believe that Google News is a success at all, and even if it is popular (which I don't have the info to say), it is definitely not a commercial success. I don't think Google News is being monetized like AP thinks.
Second: "who scrape a headline and a paragraph are taking something of value, [...]even if they drive traffic to the source. ". This is wrong, a title and a paragraph can not be something of value, the whole story is the value. Unless the paragraph is long enough to tell the whole story, then this is just a quote, rightfully acknowledging it's truthful originator through a link.
I think AP are both over-estimating G and misunderstanding how the web works. They are just using scare techniques in order to get a hold of a part of Google's ad-generated treasury, even though it's not theirs.
What will happen if all their stories and all the newspapers are removed from the indexes? The fall will be instantaneous.
the NY Times had a great article titled "The A.P.’s Real Enemies Are Its Customers" and another is a Pajama's Media article title "Is the Associated Press Good for America?"
The problem is that AP has become competitive to their members and many would probably agree that AP has and does behave more like a stand alone corporation than it does as a non-profit member organization.
Thus the aggregator model. UNFORTUNATELY that tends to kill the local paper on the INTERNET since everyone carries the exact (so to speak) story as everyone else. I have no solution, but I can say the present system is not working.
I'd guess that, if there is a solution, it will involve local news media abandoning the "trying to be all things to all men" model to focus on local news and sports. Chances are, this require the collapse of traditional metropolitan newspapers, with new (and smaller) local news media stepping in to fill the gap.
There's a place for local news and sports (in fact, the latter may be in more demand than news of city-council meetings and such), but local news media will end up being one station in the news buffet line, not yesterday's all-inclusive set menu.
But that is the fundamental problem in the newspaper industry today. Profits are being bled off by "global management".
And even if you're talking about cooperating between different newspaper organizations, AP could morph (further) into the dark side easily enough. After all, the RIAA started out as a group of engineers setting standards for interoperability of radios.... and look what it ended up--scrounging through kindergartens and graveyards looking for innocent victims to slander in sworn court filings (and STILL being a financial drain on its members!)
I somehow doubt, however, that adding yet another layer of monopolistic hegemony is going to somehow fix it.
Google et. al want ot make money. Regardless of their corporate doublespeak they are no one's friend.
Some of the most important, and societal changing, stories have been generated via newspaper investigative reporting. Love 'em or hate'em, they do serve an invaluable purpose in free society.
Let them die and we will all be poorer for it.
Again the Associated Press is trying to strong arm and coerce webmasters, bloggers, the aggregators and online news into accepting terms that no court would ever grant them. I have used the analogy of a local gang of thugs extorting protection money from terrified little business-people.
The AP is probably willing to bet that not too many people have the resources or willingness to mount a defense.
The AP clearly feels entitled to complete ownership of the news.. Not just the protected expression of the news, that is rightfully protected by copyrght, but the facts of the news as well. That is what the "Hot News" part is all about.
What is interesting also is that the AP will be the first to take from others and wave the claim of fair use of other peoples effort and content for their own purposes.
In the end this is all about money to the AP... don't EVER forget that.
The AP clearly feels entitled to complete ownership of the news.. Not just the protected expression of the news, that is rightfully protected by copyrght...
In the case of "the news" it is rather difficult to make such a clear distinction between fact and expression.
If you want facts, look at last year's farm bill - all 1200+ pages of it. Getting the facts into a digestible form takes a lot of expression.
Or, sit in on a news conference about the Pirates of Somalia. Unless you want to present a transcript of the event, you will need to mix equal parts "fact" and "expression".
The facts are out there for you, if you are willing to do the research, make the connections, travel to the source, etc.
But, if you want something more than raw facts I would suggest that it is "value added" and the publishers should be paid for it. Aggregators and SE's should not be able to advance their bottom line without concern for the resources consumed in generating the content that they want to use.
The AP clearly feels entitled to complete ownership of the news.. Not just the protected expression of the news, that is rightfully protected by copyrght, but the facts of the news as well.
The AP is a monopoly (at least in the USA) and has been since the demise of UPI. The notion that giving the AP and its owners even more power over distribution of the news will increase competition seems pretty farfetched to me.
Information travels faster and more freely then it used to.
Information is available instantly, you no longer have to wait for your morning paper.
*************
With the above facts indisputable it is up to the AP and it's members to devise a new revenue and delivery model for the news.
However it seems they have decided to not accept that things are no longer like they used to be, and they continue to force an outdated model on us.
Their only chance is to evolve. The newspaper is all but dead.
They need to tear it down and start new, but it seems they aren't willing. I for one can't wait for these dinosaurs to be gone.
They should be asking, "How can we be a part of the new way?" Instead, they are asking, "How can we stop the new way?"
[edited by: Demaestro at 10:21 pm (utc) on April 13, 2009]
