AP watch: OHNO gets traction
Don Day June 29th, 2008
We first told you about a coalition of Ohio newspapers that are side-stepping the Associated Press model with a new collective known as the Ohio News Organization, or OHNO (which might be exactly what AP execs are thinking about now). OHNO allows the papers to swap content without feeding it to the AP machine. As we’ve detailed, the AP takes content from its members - resells it to Google and others, all while extracting money from the originating organization. OHNO is up and running, and has sparked interest from groups of papers in Texas, Indiana and Pennsylvania, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The editor of the Columbus (OH) Dispatch nailed the problem on the head: “What has happened is we’ve become the wire service for the wire service.” Bingo. With news sites competing to be first and comprehensive, the AP doesn’t have to do nearly as much on the state level anymore. They can dial up their local media sites, do some rewrites and call it a day. “If they’re our partners, they’re going to help us find ways to reduce costs,” Robert Rivard, editor of the San Antonio Express-News told the WSJ. “If they’re not our partners, they’re just vendors.”
2 Comments Add your own
1. Rob | June 29th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
AP takes content locally produced, rewrites it and sends it out on the wires. Whenever they post a news story that came from our station(s) they might give us a courtesy but they’re not giving us cash off our monthly bill for their services. So we give them content that they turn around and charge us for.
I’ve even had the local AP reporter call once and ask for court documents for a story we broke. What happened to doing your own homework? They did alright … they waited until we posted the story and court documents on our website and then just credited us in their copy but not on our billing statement.
The more I read that WSJ article the more annoyed I became because the AP really isn’t doing us any favors as everything they provide we could - and generallyy do - already get off reading news sites on the Internet.
2. Anonymous | June 29th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Now we only need someting that spells out YOKO.
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