…and thanks to Fark.com, which posted their link.

@Brink: This is an easy one. Cost-pressures in newsrooms will soon reach unprecedented levels, so it’s my business to find new ways to be compensated for our highest-value work. That’s not sour grapes.

@Rob: Lots of good points. We’re working on embedded video. To me that’s a better solution than a YouTube channel, which really yields very little money and is more of a marketing play. And we could do better at internal syndication.

@Terry: The advertiser dilution problem must be solved in the new model. Let’s say, as an idea, AP reduces annual costs for its member sites and switches to a per-story syndication model. Over a 24-hour period since a story is “syndicated” into AP, anyone who runs the story with their own local ads gives up a percentage of online revenue associated with it (which goes to the originating source and the AP). After 24-hours, this revenue share ends. Yes, this is a tremendously complex idea, but worth exploring IMHO.

one would think a method of serving ads “local” to the user rather than the content would already be consider s.o.p. for stories that go viral.

This concern about ‘exclusivity’ is what online journalists fight against with their news managers who want the story to break on TV or in print and not the web. It’s something that’s been getting preached / taught here for years, so you know full well what the repercussions are with posting exclusive content online.

I’m sorry, I hold KING5.com in high regard (Disclaimer: I used to work for KING5.com management.) but I have to ask:

Your video got pirated and put on YouTube … I ask why doesn’t KING5 have a YouTube channel and why didn’t you syndicate that content there before someone else did?

Why can’t KING5 videos be embeddable, and if necessary with a pre-roll worked into that video embed system so that whatever blog it gets posted to your advertisers are still getting eyeballs?

Why wasn’t your story syndicated across your company’s network of websites and referring people back to your site for more information?

Where’s the ‘big coverage’ of the story on KING5.com? I see the story, a separate clip from the Today Show not linked to your story, a couple links and a little red ‘First on KING5.com’ sticker inside the story.

Where’s the promotional push on your site backed up by the content you developed supplemented by everything you’re aggregating from other sources that have added perspective to your original story to show that not only was this an exclusive but you’re continuing to lead the coverage on this story?

http://www.tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/03/report_girl_safe_and_asleep_in.php

One of the few ways to improve the situation is to call people out when you see it, in the hopes that the web will self-correct itself into a kind of watchdog for this kind of thing.

I think it’s important to have national AP stories on local sites. Yes, people come to your site for local news, but while they’re there, why not give them some other headlines? It’s not like we’re low on bandwidth or server space. I don’t think it’s that unusual to see some national AP stories creep into a site’s most e-mailed or most clicked. I’m not saying that’s the cash crop (nor should it be), but the state and national AP wires do have value.

To set a price while other news organizations gets their own source would work against us as much as it would help us — especially against television stations — how many VOSOTs a day credit a newspaper? If we expect payment for our good stuff, would we have to pay the local papers to mention their stories in our newscast? And while there are lots of reporters banging out great stories every day, a lot of packages are just newspaper stories with nat sound and the occasional fresh angle. TV stations don’t have the staff members to break stories like newspapers do, so we’d be on the short-end of the pay-for-breaking news model.

I don’t want to be the crabby naysayer on this one, cause everyone could use a little profit shakeup, but we’re affiliates. It’s our job to kick content upstairs. I’m not saying we’re the minor leagues, but NBC let’s us wear their uniforms, take their nightly packages and sell advertising on their content.

We work for our local users, and while advertisers don’t usually care where the clicks come from, I think we shouldn’t bang our heads against the walls because larger fish in larger ponds are taking our content.

National AP stories drive very little traffic on local TV sites (people read them elsewhere). But popular local stories like the Clinton ad girl can drive hundreds of thousands of page views on sites like NYTimes.com.

The value in AP is its local coverage, which is a whole other mess.

re: Joe:
I agree that it really stings when you have that perfect gem of a story and the aggregators point to a blog post, but I wouldn’t sweat it. I actually think there is justice in the aggregator world. In the end, it’ll evens out. You’ll get links you didn’t deserve.

Those Zen-like responses sound a little to passive for me personally, but when it comes to sharing content, you have to let it slide off your back and believe it’ll even out.

What if the AP had a system that you could syndicate your story through AP network and get a cut of all subsequent pageviews? Sure, this has complexity written all over it, but we need to start figuring this out.