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The Associated Press Declares War on the Online World
Posted By Tom Blumer On July 30, 2009 @ 12:40 am In . Column2 01, . Positioning, Blogosphere, Media, Money | 35 Comments
My beloved, eternally bumbling Chicago Cubs swept the even lowlier Washington Nationals in a three-game mid-July series. I read that in [1] an Associated Press report headlined Big 4th inning gives Cubs sweep of Nationals.
Will reporting this result to readers get me in trouble someday soon?
That result isnt as far-fetched as you might think.
On July 23, the AP, that empire of alleged journalism that [2] characterizes itself as The Essential Global News Network, [3] signaled its intention to fundamentally change its relationship with the rest of the online world:
As part of a strategy approved Thursday by the APs board, the cooperative will start by bundling its text stories in an informational wrapper that will include a built-in beacon to monitor where stories go on the Internet.
The beacon is meant to be a policing device aimed at deterring websites from posting AP content without paying licensing fees. The AP and its member newspapers contend unlicensed use of their material is costing them tens of millions of dollars in potential ad revenue.
This is a pivotal step in the fight to ensure that quality journalism can be funded in the digital era, Tom Curley, APs chief executive, said in an interview. We have stood by too long and watched other people make money off the hard work of our journalists. We have decided to draw a line in concrete.
The wire service expects to roll out the informational wrapper in stages beginning in November.
APs press release is troubling enough, but in a related New York Times interview that day with Richard Perez-Peña, APs Curley [4] added this:
The companys position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. He specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article, a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, news aggregators, and blogs.
Asked if that stance went further than the AP had gone before, he said, Thats right.
While APs aggressive posture is of course largely about money, it is also about control, accountability, and thin-skinned resistance to criticism. The only thing up for debate is the relative importance of each factor.
Of course, the money involved is a big deal. In its press release, AP cites a roughly 6.5% drop in revenue in 2008 from $748 million to $700 million. It expects another drop in 2009 because of reductions in fees charged to newspapers and broadcasters.
The wire service should consider itself lucky, because it is. While APs revenue declines are only a bit less than those seen at larger subscribing outlets such as [5] the New York Times (down 7.6% in 2008) and [6] Gannett (down 9%), problems further down the newspaper food chain are clearly much more serious. Click on the Quarterly tab at [7] this Newspaper Association of America link (HT: [8] Newsosaur), and youll see that total print advertising revenues in the first quarter of 2009 ($5.923 billion) were 36% lower than 1Q08 ($9.296 billion) and a shocking 55% lower than 1Q06 ($13.245 billion). In that context, it would seem that APs price breaks are nowhere near what its subscribers need to survive.
In fact, APs relative strength, and its ability to limit its fee reductions to far less than the revenue hits its subscribers are taking, are a result of its dominant, near-monopoly market position. Because of the steep decline in available resources and a worse crash in credibility during the past decade at the New York Times, AP reports now probably form the basis for the vast majority of most newspapers national news and a high plurality of their international news. AP reports very often serve as the starting point for top- and bottom-of-hour radio newscasts, and more than likely drive a large portion of the content of television news shows and newscasts. For breaking daily business news, the nation, heaven help us, is largely at APs mercy, where the economic narrative shaped by its fundamentally weak and insufferably biased reporters seems to insinuate itself everywhere.
Though the wire service has content licensing agreements with the major search engines and some aggregators, it currently only gains financially when visitors click through to AP or a subscribing affiliate. Thats not enough for Curley & Co. They want to get credit when a user only lands on the page containing a related search engine listing or, as noted above, arrives at a page with a mere headline even if the user never actually looks at it.
In taking this position, the AP and Curley apparently believe that megasites like Matt Drudge, whose every linked headline drives [9] hundreds of thousands if not occasionally millions of readers to their related stories, and who on his own provides ten links to the wire service that are visible 24-7-365, should be paying AP for the privilege of beefing up APs and its subscribers traffic, and even for every user who visits him. Charging Drudge, or a search engine, or anyone else, for a user who doesnt click through is like making a store pay a nickel for every customer who walks by the newspaper rack, whether or not they even look, let alone buy.
Beyond that, AP seems to believe that blogs, forums, and other online outlets that link and excerpt its material (perhaps even emailers, texters, and Twitterers?) have no right to do so without compensating AP.
Of course, the APs position is economically ignorant, at least in the short term. There will be pushback from those who will refuse to link to AP. Others will likely figure out how to disable the wrapper, while still others will resort to likely wrapper-proof screen shots and area grabs.
If Curley & Co. were consistent, they would prevent web crawlers from indexing the wire services content. But that would require them to build a web business on their own. Fat chance of that.
APs astounding arrogance is intensely galling. These control freaks seem to believe that they not only own the news, but also that the news is only what they say it is and that you have to come to them to get it or otherwise pay for the privilege...
Shut down those non-MSM outlets, blogs.
In other words, accept the MSM take on all issues or stfu!
I cannot blame AP for expecting to get paid when their reporatage is reported online by other media outlets.
After all, it is they who paid to gather the news, so why shouldn't they expect compensation from other media outlets using their reports?
Charging Drudge, or a search engine, or anyone else, for a user who doesnt click through is like making a store pay a nickel for every customer who walks by the
newspaper rack, whether or not they even look, let alone buy.
AP seems to believe that blogs, forums, and other online outlets that link and excerpt its material (perhaps even emailers, texters, and Twitterers?) have no right to do so without compensating AP.
