Oops-AP's non profit distribution service has a few teething problems

An interesting piece from Nieman Journalism Lab's Laura McGann who looks at the first six months of AP's non profit distribution project.

As she says it looked on launch to be a win win scenario

the wire service was going to begin distributing content from four top nonprofit news outlets: ProPublica, Center for Public Integrity, Center for Investigative Reporting, and the Investigative Reporting Workshop. Newspapers could run in-depth content from well respected outlets, and nonprofits could broaden their audience.

The reality though is that it appears that AP members have used little if any nonprofit content which may be down to the delivery platform AP uses to share the stories.

there’s no alert system to notify editors when something new has been added. Nonprofits’ stories are not distributed over the AP’s main wire services, as a major AP investigation would.

Icon AP photos of the Noughties

Some good pictures to remind us of the decade as its international regional photo editor, Odd Anderson presents a selection of his icon images.

They include chaotic scenes at the funeral of Yasser Arafat,the hooded Iraqi prisoner comforting his son behind barbed wire and George Bush pulling a face as he finds the door locked at a Beijing press conference

Check the images out here

Good on you Jeff Jarvis

Jeff Jarvis has been doing some thinking on his Buzz Machine blog recently.

Firstly his post The speech the NAA should hear seems to have hit the nail right on the head

You blew it.
You’ve had 20 years since the start of the web, 15 years since the creation of the commercial browser and craigslist, a decade since the birth of blogs and Google to understand the changes in the media economy and the new behaviors of the next generation of - as you call them, Mr. Murdoch - net natives. You’ve had all that time to reinvent your products, services, and organizations for this new world, to take advantage of new opportunities and efficiencies, to retrain not only your staff but your readers and advertisers, to use the power of your megaphones while you still had it to build what would come next. But you didn’t.

Then in an angry but constructive response to the AP threats he says that

The problem today is that aggregators favor freshness, but the latest story in a topical cluster is often the 87th rewrite of the news and it’s usually from the Associated Press, which cuts off links and credit to the original journalism (for all its bluster, the AP is actually the biggest problem newspapers have online, but more on that in a minute).