Now that Google has moved forward with the Associated Press to host the wire service’s stories — instead of linking off to newspaper sites — blogger Steve Boriss believes it’s time to rethink AP’s model. “Being a member of the AP made sense when papers were necessary middlemen for people to get their news — papers would pay the AP for electronically-transmitted stories, then reprint them and sell them for a profit to a public that had no better access to the freshest news,” he writes. “But now that the internet and Google News have essentially installed an AP News Terminal on the PC of everyone with broadband service, newspapers who are members of the AP are funding their own destruction.”
For sake of argument, imagine for a moment if your newspaper (or TV station for that matter) posts a fascinating, exclusive local story that happens to have national interest. Any good AP bureau worth its salt will pick up the story in a matter of hours and move it on the national wire. Then almost instantly, it’s hosted on Yahoo News, MSNBC, CNN and Google News, generating hundreds of thousands of ad impressions (or more) — and not a penny goes back to the originating publisher. In return, the member newspaper has access to a wide variety of national stories, but they’re already available all over the place online — which by extension reduces their value to local publishers.
Boriss also brings up the prickly issue of local broadcasters pulling local newspaper stories via the wire and posting them online (and occasionally vice-versa). Now that both mediums have expanded to the web, they’re direct competitors. And the local wire goes a long way to beef up the depth of content on a local TV site.
This is a complex issue and we’ve just scratched the surface here, but the CNN-Internet Broadcasting deal — which involves linking directly to partner sites instead of hosting their stories — offers an intriguing glimpse into a future of compensating local publishers commensurate to the value and popularity of their work. And as news continues to commoditize, original enterprise stories (which cost more to produce) will become increasingly valuable and demand a new approach to distribution.
- Last week: CNN drops Reuters, says “content ownership is king”
