Over here in the US, it would seem that the Associated Press is getting its nose bent out of joint by blogger's. Only last week AP declared all of its content, even one-sentence snippets, off limits to bloggers. They claim that every comma, every period, every quote mark in an AP story is covered by their copyright. A policy that came to light after the venerable news organization sent a nastygram to The Drudge Retort (not to be confused with The Drudge Report) for excerpting several AP articles.
Needless to say, this didn't sit too well with a great many inhabitants of the blogosphere. After heaps of criticism, and getting their *** kicked, the AP backpedaled slightly. They've agreed to meet with some Dufus by the name of Robert Cox, who is president of the Media Bloggers Association, an organization I've never heard of, to hash out details of a truce.
The problem is we're looking at yet another business model that invariably gets imploded by the Net. The AP charges news outlets for access to its wire service, which allows regional newspapers to cover global stories at a fraction of the cost of sending their own reporters.
But in the blogosphere, all you need is one outlet reporting one AP story and it it's all over, with no need to pay for that expensive wire service. Worse yet for AP, blogger's who link to the original story are usually linking to one of AP's customers or a news aggregator like Google or Yahoo. And, these are the sites that get the traffic, not AP.
The great thing about this story is that yet again the internet proves its worth as the most disruptive of disruptive innovations - interestingly Techcrunch has banned AP from its highly influential site/forums, a big middle finger to The Man as they, rightly, point out they are often, as are others, breaking news stories way ahead of traditional press agencies – who needs AP?
George Parker
Blogging for:
Member since: 03 Jun 2008
Last login: 17 Nov 2009
Total Posts: 831
