AP chief threatens to take its content and go home
After failing to understand how to squeeze money through the Internet’s series of tubes, Associated Press Chairman “Willie Dean” Singleton is now shaking his fist at anyone that dares to mention one of its articles. Here’s why the venerable news organization’s approach will only make it more vulnerable to online news.
Traditional news organizations relished the days when it had one-way flow of information into people’s homes. They didn’t have to worry about just anyone discussing their ideas or challenging them in public.
The Internet has opened up millions of outlets where individuals can share their view at a very low cost of entry. It turns out that people have truly insightful views on the world around them and want to learn and share the latest news.
These blogs and non-traditional news sources volley back and forth on ideas, linking to one another to point out the most interesting and useful notions of the day. These ideas, when tossed back and forth across thousands of blogs, form a conversation.
All of these links back and forth also signal to Google and other search engines which ideas are really worthwhile. The search engines then boost these sites in the ratings, even if they weren’t the first investigative journalist on the scene.
Willis Dean feels journalists at AP newspapers are quite busy and shouldn’t be subjected to the ideas of non-professionals. So they don’t link to anyone else’s ideas and threaten these amateurs for paraphrasing their stories, even if they attribute the story with a link.
By not engaging in the conversation on the Web, newspapers are losing their ‘link juice’ with Google. By discouraging attribution to AP journalists, the organization is actually devaluing its own stories online.
The Internet opens most newspapers up to a much wider audience than its local circulation, but it does come at a high price. Learning how to join the conversation, write stories that are easily searchable and not alienate your classmates are all things that Willie Dean Singleton should have learned on the playground.
If the AP continues to block itself off from the rest of the conversation on the Web, it will most certainly end in sending home its journalists who can either fight the change going on in mainstream media or roll with it. Hopefully AP organizations can reign in their clueless leader while the world still recognizes the AP logo.
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April 7th, 2009
I can understand AP’s anguish – but the world has changed, and as you point out Dave, they need to change with it.
April 7th, 2009
Hi Dave,
Thanks for saying in at least a slightly better way what I was merely ranting about yesterday. I will be most pleased to steal your ideas and expose them over at our blog, hopefully later today.
By the way, I’m a burned out obsolete IT type. Started out with ear protection and iso-propyl alcohol serving a room full of 500+ Kilobytes of XDS Sigma 5 and got as far as Multics and PL/I (humble application maintenance, alas) before petering out. One slightly amusing but ultimately futile off-budget effort was demonstrating that you could build a pretty interesting one-way function for authentication purposes with Rubik’s Cube. Here’s a hint how I did it (much of that content’s mine–yours for the browsing).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoradic
I have spent the first going-on 3 years of post-retirement jumping up and down like a demented hamster warning the web about the evils of SFAS 140 abuse in the context of America’s quasi-private mortgage finance. As it turned out, that was mildly important, but if Singleton had had his way back in mid-’06 it would have snuffed that effort pretty effectively, and I wouldn’t have been around to throw vegetables at Jim Lockhart’s ridiculous “effective guarantee” of agencies, etc. Think that’s the real point? (obviously not me, but the hoard of people like me examining every move of the powers-that-be, not to mention the occasional outlier like my colleagues Aaron Krowne & the late Doris Dungey who *do* make a difference).
Anyway, here I go stealing this bit of content from ZDNet’s Larry Dignan. I think he’s got a good point to add to the present topic.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=15877
“I’m not going to sweat AP’s search for rules of engagement for one simple reason (Techmeme, AP statement [links in original, of course]): I link to the real source material, which more often than not is a press release. On any given day you can easily bypass AP. And if the AP wants to find a better subscriber business model it needs to adhere to two words: Add value. Is AP trying to protect its “industry’s content” or PR Newswire’s?”
April 7th, 2009
“Industry content”? WTF?
When was the freedom of the press, freedom of speech and the public’s right to know overturned?
I thought the Berlin Wall along with the Iron Curtain fell years ago,….can you say censorship comrade?
No one “OWNS” the freaking news. Hello???
April 7th, 2009
Wow, I can’t work out whether John McLeod’s comment is spam or a real comment…
April 8th, 2009
… funny, I have days like that with John Ryskamp ;-)
May 13th, 2009
Mr. Jeyes, with all due respect, you missed a very important point.
It’s fine for people to discuss the news and voice their opinions. That’s great.
The AP’s main purpose, though, is not voicing opinions. It’s about gathering reporting facts. Reporters are paid to investigate, interview, compile information and tell what happened, hopefully without injecting their opinions. That costs money. Newspapers and local TV newsrooms are being hurt by declining advertising support in the new reality of a china-mart retail world, and many local radio news operations are already gone. (the only news I hear on our local stations is some guy reading the local paper, without the bylines)
If a new business model for gathering and reporting news doesn’t gain traction soon, accurate and reliable reporting will become a thing of the past. The public’s watchdog will die. And then there will be a lot more to talk about, but you won’t know if it’s really true.
But then, some people find the concept of anarchy to be a desirable thing.