I couldn’t have guessed that I’d be weeks ahead of the curve in slagging the Associated Press in my Feb. 26 post, but the AP has managed to place itself at the forefront of the debate over the future of the news business. At its core, it strikes me as bizarre that this kind of frenzy could possibly take place over something like a news wire service — it’s sort of like presidential candidates debating whether the sky is light blue or medium-blue. I think the real reason for the attention is the elevated level of cluelessness on the part of AP and Wall Street Journal executives that’s being revealed in this discussion — they’re proving to be even more tone-deaf than American auto industry execs, which I bet Detroit is mightily thankful for at this juncture in their history.
Anyway, there’s this bit, in which the AP’s chairman decried the practice of aggregators linking to and excerpting AP content and got into some rather nasty name-calling (backed up by a Wall Street Journal executive who referred to “certain web sites” (*cough* Google) as “parasites”. Danny Sullivan had an excellent response in which he suggested that if the news services didn’t want Google’s attention, they’ve always had a simple way to reject it (through a file that bans search engines called robots.txt). But they won’t do this, of course, which is the reason why they’re now resorting to public whining and name-calling — it’s all they’ve got left. Traditional news businesses are stuck in a bear trap called the internet, and they can’t decide whether to saw their own legs off or slowly bleed to death.
This was followed, perhaps not coincidentally, a few days later with a nastygram from the AP to a Tennessee radio station that was embedding AP videos on its web site. What’s wrong with this? Not only is the Tennessee station an AP affiliate, these are videos that the AP posts to YouTube for anyone to watch. When questioned about it, the AP’s nastygram department didn’t even know that the AP’s department of internet video goodness was putting content on YouTube for free. The tactical lesson here, obviously, is to get your story straight before making mindless accusations, but who knows what the overall strategy is. I don’t know if the AP even has a victory condition in mind here, but if they do, they can’t be making much progress toward it.
Jeff Jarvis wrote a good post yesterday in which he calls for the AP to be shut down. I think that “shut down” is an unnecessarily confrontational way to put it; I much prefer the internet principle of routing around damage. I don’t think that the AP represents all of what’s wrong with the business of news, but they sure do suck a lot of oxygen out of the room.
To support news reporting in the future we’re going to need a new ecosystem of news and information, and it’s going to require us to build new nodes, not just tear down old ones.
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