Printed Matters

And I have a suggestion to help them make it better.

To recap: the Associated Press, that old and venerable newswire from the States (and the ONLY one from the States, since UPI dodoed in 1993) last week sent a cease and desist notice to Rogers Cadenhead and his Drudge Retort for that site’s practice of allowing users to include snippets of stories to start off discussions about the stories. The AP took offense and told Cadenhead to remove seven posts that referred to AP stories with snippets ranging from 33 to 79 words long. Cadenhead complied, but bloggerdom was incensed and it started a mini-war between the AP and bloggers, with two prominent bloggers, Jeff Jarvis and Michael Arrington, making almost opposite suggestions on how to deal with the problem.

The problem of course is that the AP’s online business strategy is totally wrong, and will always be at odds with bloggers because it is at odds with the Internet. The AP, like the Canadian Press in our own country, licenses content to its members for use in their publications – including websites. (Since 2006 they have charged members separately for print and online usage, but that is not germane here.) The AP has its own staff of reporters and editors, and members also contribute to the pool.

That’s fine and dandy for print. Papers can beef up their national sections with high-quality reporting without having to hire their own stringers, correspondents, and so on. The few people who subscribe to more than one paper might see the same story in two different papers, but that doesn’t hurt anything.

Not so with the Web. The practice of publishing the same story on many different websites causes no end of trouble, not least of which is plugging up news search results with hundreds of copies of the same story. Google must have a hell of a time with duplicate wire stories – how can it legitimately punish spam scraping sites (splogs, e.g.) if mainstream news organizations are doing the same stupid thing?

Plus, the practice goes against the whole link ethic thing espoused by Jarvis and Scott Karp. It’s just not webby. It’s old-school.

So naturally there’s friction between the AP and bloggers, who “get” the Net. Bloggers want to link and quote. The AP needs to protect its copyright because its business model depends on it.

I won’t go into the whole question of whether what the Drudge Retort users do is copyright infringement. I’m not a lawyer, and it’s a pretty murky area of law. Who knows what a judge will say?

For the record I think it’s not copyright infringement. But given their business model – one that is at odds with the rest of the Internet – I think the AP has no choice but to protect its writing. After all, they can’t own the actual facts or events on which the news is based. The value their writers add is mainly tied up in the head and lead – the very things which tend to get snippeted. What they are selling is the ability for other websites to use that value. I think it’s pretty clear that their service gets devalued when other websites that don’t pay for the service can use most of that value on their sites too.

Keep in mind this is all predicated on their present online business model, which is wrong. It can’t last, as Michael Arrington has pointed out, for the same reasons that the music industry can’t use its same old model. You just can’t beat a force like the Internet. And, I don’t want it to last. I want more sensible Google News results. And I want news organizations to practice link journalism and get rid of the churnalism. And I want to support original journalism at its source, since that is how it will survive.

So here’s what I think the AP (and the CP, for that matter) should do. They should get rid of the subscribing-and-licensing model for online. It works in print, and I think it is a good thing in print, so keep it there, just not online. For online, they need to license exclusive rights to stories. Each story gets printed in full on exactly one news website. Not necessarily the same website – each story gets put on the block and any news site can buy the online rights to it. They could even have auctions for exclusivity. That one news website would then enjoy all the link-and-quote love that other news sites and bloggerdom will heap upon it. That one news website would then be in charge of its own copyright issues and would thrive or FAIL based on its own understanding of how the web works.

Member papers would naturally keep their own exclusive web rights for their own stories, even if those stories are in the print pool. I’d guess, anyway – that’s a detail for them to work out. The important point is that each story gets published on exactly one website. Other news sites that have nothing new to add or no commentary, etc. would link back to the original reporting at a single point of origin.

And that single point might even be the AP’s own site. What a powerhouse of PageRank that would be if they would only follow this simple advice.

A move back to my hometown of Parry Sound and an accounting glitch with my web host have put me behind in my blogging, so this post is coming out a little after the fact, but I couldn’t resist commenting on the Globe and Mail’s assertion that “the locks are off” of formerly paid content on their website.

No they’re not.

Do a search on the Globe’s website for just about anything. Narrow the search parameters using their search tool to dates within, say, this past February. Almost everything that comes up still has locks on it. Who are they trying to kid?

This seems ass-backwards to me. What is valuable about news is its newness. If they want to keep a paywall on something, why not make it today’s news, or yesterdays news, after which they open up the archives to search engines and let bloggers (and others) link freely to them? And reap all that extra long-tail traffic?

Who is going to pay for old stories? I don’t understand this logic. And what blogger (or other news organization, or anybody) is going to want to link to Globe and Mail articles if they know those links won’t work after a couple of months?

Mathew Ingram thinks the reason his employer has done this is the same as the reason the New York Times took their pay wall down: to move to an advertising model rather than a subscription model for the archives. But Mathew, the G&M didn’t take the pay wall off its archives, it took it off some of the columnists (and games) that were previously for-pay. Completely different animal. I don’t know what the Globe’s reasons were for this move, but it sure doesn’t look like a move to join “the Internet era”. It still looks like these guys don’t get the web at all.