The Associated Press is yapping again about the “exploitation of news” by search engines, news aggregators and, well, the Internet itself. The CEO of the AP, Tom Curley, told a media industry powwow in Beijing:
We will no longer tolerate the disconnect between people who devote themselves — at great human and economic cost — to gathering news of public interest and those who profit from it without supporting it.
I am temporarily lifting our ban on AP stories to make a point. The remarks seemed to be directed at Google, among others. But if you follow the link above, it will take you to an AP article hosted on Google. Is Google stealing it? No, Google already licenses stories from the AP, so it is already “supporting it.”
What’s really behind all the bluster is that the AP is in the midst of renegotiating a new licensing deal with Google, and is using vague public threats to try to get more money out of them. It’s really kind of sad. The AP is just so desperate for cash as its revenues begin to fade that it doesn’t know whether to brandish a stick or a carrot. Just the day before, Curley put out a trial balloon to see if search engines like Google would be willing to pay extra to get news delivered 20 to 30 minutes faster.
At press conference I attended on Wednesday, an AP reporter asked Google CEO Eric Schmidt what he thought about paying extra for 20-minute exclusives. Schmidt responded, “We have a contract with the AP. I don’t want to talk about a proposed service where we pay more.” In other words, he isn’t going to negotiate in public.
He didn’t sound too enthusiastic about the premium service anyway. “We have to be very careful not to favor one publisher over another,” he said. Exactly. The AP can go ahead and delay its news as much as it likes. The rest of us will be happy to fill in.
It wasn’t just the AP who was bashing the Web. Rupert Murdoch joined, railing against online “aggregators,” “plagiarists,” and “kleptomaniacs.” It is a tired refrain, and self-serving from someone who now wants to charge for online contenet. News organizations need to either evolve or die. Just today, one of Murdoch’s competitors, Hearst, launched its own news aggregator, LMK. Has Hearst joined the ranks of plagiarists too?
It’s funny. Both Curley and Murdoch were singing different tunes just a few years ago. But they have different agendas now.
Photo credit: Flickr/Quinn Dombrowski
Where is the first post about the MSFT competition where we have to find the upper case words? It seems to have disappeared.
kelptomaniacs? people who steal kelp?
yeah – that some expensive shit you know
that would be someone who loves kelp, like a manatee or something. Typo fixed, thnx.
“Like, get over the whole ‘money’ thing, AP. Totally.
It’s so *tired*. Hello!”
yeah just as tired as blaming the internet.
It is pretty sad. I wonder how this will affect all the free RSS feeds that everyone shares and uses? What if MSNBC posts AP article and puts that AP article in the MSNBC top news RSS feed.
Posts like this make me realize that i like TechCrunch more than i thought
Jesus, die already. (Imagining that cow from “Me, Myself, and Irene” ).
yeah let’s blame the internet, the free loaders, and people while we’re at it. you didn’t need to explain all of that erick, because it is quite clear what this tom curley is doing and why the ap is going this route. $$$$ talks. when i was reading your live notes from the press conference and saw that ap reporter’s question i reread it and thought wtf…but i guess if ap is losing money it’s felt form the top down (probably more like bottom-up). rupert murdoch and his tupee can jump up my behind. i am so sick of people like them. i mean i’m not the biggest supporter of the internet, but then again i don’t have an agenda i need to propell nor do i have something i need to protect/stand behind. it’s a business. they have to fight for their rights and their bottom lines too, despite google. it’s okay if they want to go the paywall route if that’s what they feel is right and if they feel their customers will support them…but them doing it just cause because they are in a tight, or tighter spot as time passes and things change around them, doesn’t bode well for their bottom line in the long run. reactionary much… i mean we already know you are renegotiating with google and that since you are not making as much money, this time you will like to pull the wool/outsmart GOOG and have the deal fare better for your side. fine. but get this you don’t need to be making the statements you keep making tom curley. it really doesn’t help your position. mr. schonfeld doesn’t need to tell me this is sad, the fact is that for you to be so disturbed to make statements like this, just means either the times are sad and are insurmountable, or maybe you’re just a sad person. sth up.
keep the ap ban.
Without money, AP can’t pay the staff writers and photographers who create much of what AP distributes, along with material provided by subscriber news organisations.
It’s short-sighted to think that AP is just a news aggregator, which it most definitely is not. It a news-reporting company, with a large editorial staff, globally, and it’s not unreasonable to think that they might want to recover some of those costs.
This all just reminds me of the European scribes guilds who held adoption of the printing press for a century in some countries.
And it’s boring.
Bad analogy. European scribes weren’t creating the content. AP actually creates the content. Try again.
Tulsa FTW
ok then. how about the recording industry and radio?
some people find the radio to be an adequate source of music. others like a song they hear on the radio but want more and purchase the record so they can listen to it anytime, hear the whole album, etc.
some people find the two sentence news summaries on google to be an adequate source of news. others would like to read the whole story so they click through to the newspapers site.
the radio and google might satisfy some who would have purchased the content creators product, but this is greatly out weighed by the advertising/traffic that sends new customers to the content creator.
If AP stopped providing news content to Google and Yahoo, where would the portals get their news from?
I’m sorry – you are asking a logical question that has no place in this blog. Don’t you know that great journalists are easily going to be replaced by citizen bloggers? (P.S. I’m neither a journalist nor great. Just someone who loves to read good writing and is worried it will someday be drowned out by a million blog postings.)
From another news agency?
I agree with desien.
Does anyone disagree with Curley’s statement:
“We will no longer tolerate the disconnect between people who devote themselves — at great human and economic cost — to gathering news of public interest and those who profit from it without supporting it.”
The issue is who do they deem to be freeloading for profit. There are sites that link to their stories and other sites that scrap their stories. There’s a difference (I think scraping is largely a copyright issue when content is copied).
It’s not really an attack on the Internet, but rather how the Internet can be and is being used (i.e., “the everything should be free” movies, music, original writings, etc.) . Similar issues arose when copy machines started popping up everywhere. Companies would by one subscription, and make copies (court said was copyright infringement). The Copy Clearance Center was created to address this by making it easier for company’s to obtain licenses to make copies, etc.
We need to think of ways to properly compensate those who gather news, report and otherwise generate original contents and penalize those who use it for profit without compensation.
Although not a great movie (it was pretty good), Russell Crowe’s “State of Play” did a good job of showing was news gathering sometimes involves.
The BBC miniseries State of Play is a great miniseries FYI. I saw it about a year ago and it definitely shows you the professional and financial requirements and skills required to pursue an important story. Pursuing these stories can require thousands of dollars which unfortunately cannot be recouped by running Google AdSense for “get rid of your yellow teeth” next to the feed.
but if they ran an ad to “get rid of your tom curley and rupert murdoch” next to the feed, the response would be tremendous
I think Joe in Tulsa has made some valid and logical arguments here. While I do not support rabid, mindless, tired arguments (applies to both pro-old school news and pro-Google News) I do believe that there needs to be change.
However, the change cannot ignore things that Joe has pointed out (like points raised in the State of Play miniseries).
I am all for blogs, I even read TC everyday for news and opinion, but I am not oblivious to the cliff in quality of articles between prestigious publications and blogs. Reading journalism major Leena Rao’s Twitter/oneforty article, I cannot help but notice spelling errors like ’shortners’ or ‘paraphanalia’. MG Seigler is about an order of magnitude lower in English skills and responds to his juvenile commentators in an even more juvenile fashion.
These people can and never should attempt to match up with the fine writing of journalists that work for The Economist, for example. You might say they don’t want to, but if the money required for good journalism disappears, then they’re all you’re left with.
Granted, they (bloggers) give me news and (the favorite argument of free market theorists, conservatives and other people that generally replace arguments with snarly comments or screams) people will tell me- ‘Go somewhere else, vote with your feet’, I can say there may be much fewer options in the future.
The point is don’t go overboard with the kill the old guard idea, we need to save the good journalists.
No, Curley is clearly going after Google. Here is another quote from his speech:
“Random distribution of traffic by aggregators such as search engines directs audience and revenue away from those who invest in original news reports but assures the aggregators and their ad networks of a stream of revenue based on aggregation and indexing of published news content.”
I guess by “random” he means it doesn’t point to the AP.
From my perspective, the AP is kind of in the same situation as the music industry. The way content is being delivered has changed dramatically, changing their business models, and they’re struggling to cope.
Just like the music industry, the AP/Newspapers/etc. are fighting tooth-and-nail to preserve the revenue streams that have traditionally been there – even though we all can see (from an outside perspective) that it’s not going to work.
Technology is changing the way things work, and if you/we/they don’t evolve with it you’re going to die. If the AP doesn’t get it’s sh*t together and start working with people, they’re going to be left in a sad state.
Remember the AP’s idea about charging search engines to link to their content (or something to that extent) or not have them to be able to link at all? Seriously? With people thinking up that kind of stuff at the helm of the AP, is clear to see that the AP is headed straight for the top… wow.
what a bunch of hypocrites…
just look at their website
http://www.asso...tedcontent.com/
it’s basically re-purposed content that is designed to rank highly in the search engines to get ad revenue from google ads.
i don’t see associated content paying any of the news sources any money.. (other than the authors who re-purpose the content with a couple bucks from adsense)…
what comes around goes around..
WTF is associatedcontent? sounds like one guy in his garage in Colorado. What does that have to do with anything?
associated content is owned by the AP…
that’s what it has to do with everything.
BS is right. Find me one reference anywhere of AP owning Asscociated Content.
Not really news here anymore.
Expect people to defend their revenue streams.
No one –no matter if you are AP or just some lil ol blogger with 10 readers a day — wants to lose readers and potential ad money.
The more interesting tale IMHO is which of the biggest players in the storytelling business are actually innovating, changing models, and making a real run at owning the next wave of the media ocean.
But what do you think about situations when you wrote an article about some topic and had to spend a lot of time and money researching it.
Then some blog publishies its own article, summarizing your work in a paragraph and adds its own comments. Most of the time people reading the blog won’t go the original article. I must say it is hard to see it to be fair to the author of the original article.
“The AP can go ahead and delay its news as much as it likes. The rest of us will be happy to fill in.”
Yeah, I agree. Although I haven’t seen much news out of TechCrunch’s Iraq or Afghanistan bureaus lately. But I’ll be glued to my seat to read the expose of Kabul’s new talking robot or 4G roll-out.
Does this mention of a “20-30 minutes faster” service tell us that AP is currently shipping news faster to other folks than they ship it to Google? If so, either they offered that service to Google last time (and Google said no) or they’re considering screwing other folks (by delaying their feeds) to offer a premium service.
This whole “scraping” thing is either a bluff or a demonstration of technical incompetence by AP. They can use robots.txt to keep Google’s crawler out whenever they want.
One thing that the AP folks aren’t saying this time in public is that they believe that they’re entitled to a cut of Google’s SERP revenue whenever “their content” is one of the top results. They think that they should get money even when no one visits their pages instead of just getting money from advertisements on their sites.
It’s past time for Google to simply stop crawling AP and some major newspapers to remind them how the net actually works.
The photo selected to accompany this article’s title is absolute 110% win. The person choosing these has a sense of humor and I love it!
I think you’re missing the bigger picture if you think this is just a negotiating tactic. I think AP (and the other agencies) are rightly or wrongly drawing a line in the sand and are gearing up for war. Also, you’re wrong to put AP in the same bucket as newspapers, those media bundle makers as you refer to them. AP and the other agencies are a totally different beast and could perhaps be considered the first aggregators and the fathers of the real-time stream. The crown jewels of any agency being the Flashes, bulletins and urgents rather than the leads, wraps, advancers, features etc…
Myself I’m looking forward to seeing this battle play out at least we might then have some clarity on the issue
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I think that that what Google needs to do is drop AP altogether for a while. Don’t host their news stories. Don’t link their news stories, or their member papers, on Google News. Don’t index their websites or their blogs. Give them the “silent treatment.”
Then see how long it takes the AP to come crawling back begging Google to list them again.
Somewhere over the past year or three the line between “news reporting” and “commentary” blurred. Most blogs – even the better-known ones – offer commentary. Even the “scoops” are usually little more than a lucky stumbling into information.
Contrast that with a real investigative story that takes months to dig out through interview after interview. Or the reporting from a knowledgeable reporter on a complex beat. Or the story from an Economist reporter, or just about anything that comes through @LongReads. That’s journalism. Blogging is usually just commentary and opinion.
The AP does fantastic journalism. To wish it dead or to think it can be replaced by bloggers is pure folly. Tom has a point to the degree that scraping or sites like HuffPo which summarize are stealing their mojo. But he really needs to rethink his business model rather than blame search engines for his woes.
@bmoffett – Agreed. There’s opinion, reviews, commentary and than there’s digging up the news. Actually investigating a story and discovering and verifying the underlying facts takes time, energy, and resources. If it’s not adequately compensated, it will whither. Internet vs print shouldn’t matter, but not every writing is journalism.
TC is focused on tech (and often does true journalism when it scoops new tech stories through contacts, investigation, etc). But consider the impact of a lack of investigative journalism in politics, the workings of gov’ts and corporations, etc. Consider how journalists often get their information from confidential sources and whether “shield laws” and the like will provide protections when it involves blogs. At least one judge has held a shield law doesn’t protect online commenters
Richard Koman: Illinois has a shield law that protects reporters from having to reveal their sources. But a state judge held that the law does not apply to “online bloggers” and ordered the Alton Telegraph to turn over the identities of two people who commented on the newspaper’s website. Are you next?
http://governme...amp;tag=nl.e539
Here’s another
http://www.time...icle6801213.ece
A Vogue cover girl has won a precedent-setting court battle to unmask an anonymous blogger who called her a “skank” on the internet.
In a case with potentially far-reaching repercussions, Liskula Cohen sought the identity of the blogger who maligned her on the Skanks in NYC blog so that she could sue him or her for defamation.
A Manhattan supreme court judge ruled that she was entitled to the information and ordered Google, which ran the offending blog, to turn it over.
As a small-time blogger, I can almost always find a non-AP story about the same subject to quote from and link to. I don’t make nearly enough money to pay AP for words.
As a practicing journalist / blogger (the lines are pretty damn blurry these days), I have very mixed feelings. Much of what comes out of AP as original content is really a press release with a few quotes added. This stuff I think is basically commodity issue from the get-go and AP adds little value (nor does anyone else). The blogger themselves tend to add more by adding commentary and opinion. On the other hand, breaking news that is not resulting from press-releases, investigative stuff, video coverage that is expensive, and many other types of AP content are not commodity. However the blogosphere reduces them to commodity status as soon as it scrapes their content and repackages it (some bloggers, at least — not all), often without attribution. TC is notable for making sure it attributes to sources and gives credit where credit is due. However, the winner in this game is rarely determined by merit (news break, quality) and is more determined by SEO factors. I’ve seen a dozen times where a story gets Dugg up to the front page that was essentially a news scrape of another publication which is less Digg savvy or perhaps has fewer friends among the Diggerati. And there, the credit does not go to the original source but to the ones with SEO skills. This to me is akin to awarding Pullitzer prizes based on how fast you can type rather than what you are writing about.
So I agree that old-school news orgs need to change. I also agree with the old-school news orgs that the current system does not properly afford credit where credit is due and, on the Web, that means all too often that those who actually are the first in getting us the news are not the ones who make money off that news.
What will be sad is the day the AP closes (if it happens) and we are left without much of the foreign content and coverage that one can find on AP which is unique, valuable and important. Journalism is, fundamentally, a key check and balance against the powers that be. Pretending its just an information service is dangerous. If you don’t believe this, then try an experiment for a while – don’t read any blog post that links back to an original news story. See what you come up with. I tried this for about a day. It was not pretty.
people are so beyond whack. i mean i was willing to say that i love the ap and even when i’m reading the news, watching or listening to the news there is always an ap story that comes up in my life. people think the ap is the end all and be all and that it’s the only stupid orginization doing investigative journolism or reporting or whatever. please. the ap is necessary. it sucks that they have made themselves so large that they’ve become a necessary evil, but they are integral to “news” the way we know it…or the way we used to know it. like how all these big cable companies are closing local stations or the big newspapers getting rid of local newspapers and all these professionals losing jobs in their fields…and you know what i kept hearing that arrington kept hawking on this website? these former news pros admitted that the old way of doing things needed to change but that the actual way of getting news was still the same albeit with better technology and maybe more intelligent people who know how to use it to their benefit. these men and women are not going to stop just because they got fired. some of them are still working but they just aren’t working for an old model anymore and that’s why i liked aol or yahoo saying that they would hire more journalists in their fields for their online content. i agree with some of the people suggesting that google should drop ap like a hot fish. as much as i don’t even want to admitt it, since ap is a large part of my life since i am a large news consumer, there’s reuters, there’s bbc and their far reaching international workers. al stupid jeezera is spreading it’s tentacles worldwide. the ap isn’t the only actual content news generator in the world, and just because now most people or things (companies, websites) have become aggregators…i can’t say the many times i’ve seen a blogger use the information from an ap press release (unless they pay the ap) and then acctually add more content that i’m interested in or that is worthwhile than me actually going to the ap website and reading it there. o’ve only been to the ap website for the first time in years earlier this week. i don’t go to their site as a first source to anything. i never did. maybe i would have been more inclined to in the past but i am a news consumer. i don’t have loyalty to just one news source. i hope something happens because this needs to change. time keeps passing and people keep trying to turn back time. f.
Thanks for finally mentioning this. Every article I have read up to this point fails to point out that Google already pays AP for the content. Everyone is so caught up with the “X versus Google” sensationalism that they don’t fact-check anymore. I was pleasantly surprised to find at least one reputable source which mentions this fact.