AP on the attack over use of its content

Associated Press is cracking down on unlicensed use of its content on the web.

According to this report in the New York Times,the company is set to add

software to each article that shows what limits apply to the rights to use it, and that notifies The A.P. about how the article is used.

and

Tom Curley, The A.P.’s president and chief executive, said the company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it.

AP is strategically flawed says Paul Bradshaw

For a great synopsis of the arguments over AP's announcement that it will be declaring war on what is sees as illegal content,take a look at Paul Bradshaw's blog

The tanks are massing at the borders. The officers are drawing up “rules of engagement”. Soldiers are “rattling their sabres”. When times are hard, empires go to war. And so in the coming months we can expect to see “the web’s news cop” The Associated Press ignore the lessons of history and declare war against their perceived enemies.

he writes whilst pointing out that it is so strategically flawed.

AP are relatively unusual in that they are a news organisation which does actually make money from content.
The AP’s member organisations, however, make money primarily from advertising. To sell advertising you need an audience, and to get an audience you need a distribution strategy.
Pursuing your distributors for alleged copyright infringement is not a distribution strategy.
It also contributes nothing new to any business model for news online.

AP changing with the Times

There was a story of great interest that appeared over the weekend in the Washington Post.It concerns Associated Press and under the headline The AP Is Breaking More Than News

The article claims that

Some of the most eyebrow-raising stories this presidential-election cycle have come from a surprising source: the stodgy old AP. And this new boldness is threatening not only the AP's standing as a neutral arbiter of the news but also challenging its relationship with its owners, thousands of struggling U.S. newspapers that are coming to see the AP as a monster of their own creation: a competitor that could hasten their demise

Furthermore says the article

Just as the Internet is changing newspapers, so it is also changing the AP. In its efforts to survive the tectonic shifts destabilizing most daily newspapers and to brand itself online -- many of the above articles ran only on the Web as part of the new, edgier AP -- the wire service is evolving into the world's largest virtual newspaper and a direct competitor to the papers that own it

Not perhaps then the churnalism of Nick Davies after all

How Associated Press is distorting the US newspaper market

Another example of how Nick Davies' arguments are proving popular.

Over at Pajamas media,Steve Borris looks at the effect of Associated Press on the American media.

At face value, the AP seems like a good thing, allowing newspapers to pool their resources to keep costs of reporting non-local news low. But it has always been of questionable value to news consumers, reducing competition among newspapers.

For Steve the real problem today is

not the number of newspapers we now have, but that they refuse to compete with each other, a symptom of the AP-created culture of collaboration over competition

and the

creation of a news supply chain that reliably turns out monolithic, center-left news. Each evening, the New York Times and Washington Post coordinate their stories, creating what is erroneously referred to as the “national conversation,” but is really how the world looks to editors writing for audiences in the nation’s liberal centers of money and power