The Dissociated Press
I mentioned yesterday that traditional corporate news organizations are being decomposed into their constituent parts. New businesses are generally using the Web to do the carving-up — sites like Yelp are replacing the traditional restaurant review, and sites like Everyblock are replacing the police blotter, and so on. But there are still interesting areas of friction between old models and new models, and the Web isn’t the only disruptive technology out there.
The Associated Press (as I also mentioned in my post yesterday) is a newsgathering collective. It’s a co-op, owned by its member news organizations. That means that its constituents are traditional news businesses — and not, say, readers, as you might expect its natural constituency to be. Readers can’t call anyone up at the AP to complain, and they can’t write a letter to the editor of the AP. AP stories are often published completely without bylines, which means there is little personal accountability on the part of reporters (and no recourse for readers who discover factual errors in AP stories, as I sometimes do). In many respects what the AP does represents the worst of 19th-century business practices combined with a mid-20th century technology and vision.
This is important to bear in mind as we consider the case of Shepard Fairey, an artist who has been involved in a dust-up with the AP over his appropriation and remixing of an now-iconic image of President Obama.
I’m not a lawyer and I don’t have a clue as to who’s legally right in this situation (although you’d think the two parties would be able to come to some kind of agreement rather than suing each other). But think about the business reasons for why this happened in the first place. The AP is asserting that they own the rights to the original photo; Fairey admits that the photo was the basis for his work, but the fact that he remixed it makes it a new work.
We went down this road in the late 1980s with audio sampling; after the lawyers hashed it out, record companies created “special products” divisions to resell things like samples of music it owned the rights to. You want a second and a half of James Brown screaming for your new record? Sold, $10,000. And so forth.
Does the AP have a special products division? Will they sell a picture of the President to a civilian at any price? It doesn’t appear to be the case. (And if they do, what would that price be? I’m sure that Shepard Fairey would like to know.)
Reviewing the AP’s policy on reprints is instructive. From their FAQ:
All requests for republication of AP material must be in writing, clearly stating the purpose and manner in which the copy will be used. All republished material must carry AP credit. Unless specifically noted otherwise, all permission is given for one-time use only. No political candidate, political party, political action committee, polemical organization, or any group formed for partisan purpose may use AP copy in any publication. There may be a fee for reprint use.
Good krikey, people. Request in writing? Send you a fax? One-time use only? Stipulate in advance the manner in which it’s going to be used? Why, so you can pre-emptively decide whether or not it’s OK? And by whose standards? (These are rhetorical questions to which we already know the answer: to defend their dying member newspaper businesses.)
The AP’s power used to flow from their role as a syndicator — they would hook up any member newsroom with a communications cable (the literal “news wire”) through which stories and other content would flow. Now that newsrooms (and every single other person on the planet) has a better wire called the internet, there may be no good reason for the AP to exist in its role as a syndicator, except for inertia. To put it in economic terms, it is a classic example of an inefficient marketplace.
The AP combines several roles of the news business — they do news reporting and editing as well as syndication. Could the news syndication part of the Associated Press evolve into a new organization that isn’t beholden to dysfunctional old-model newspaper businesses? Maybe, but I think it would take a new organization to come along and disrupt it. Call it the Dissociated Press (until we come up with a name that has fewer letters in it). The DP could serve as a hub for news (and non-news) content. It could also serve as a content marketplace. If you take a picture of an airliner that’s crashed into the Hudson, instead of giving it away, you would send it to the DP and attach a price tag to it (which could be $0). If a news organization wanted to use it, they’d pay the DP, which would then pay you.
On the buy side, there would be no membership requirements, and no annual fees — strictly pay as you go — and anyone could join: CNN, tiny local newspapers, political parties, bloggers, mad scientists, whoever. The open business model would be the principal source of disruption.
If you’re looking for an iTunes for news, maybe something like the Dissociated Press is it. But unlike the white-haired dudes in suits who think that consumers should be paying $0.99 to read the front page, maybe the key is to get other publishers (not necessarily just newspapers) to pay. After all, they do this today.
