Zac Echola is muffin but trouble

Say it: Google News (now with AP style!)

Published on 08/09/07
by Zac Echola

Google News has closed out their outbound links to AP stories on newspaper.com sites. They’re now posting Associated Press news stories to their own domain, rather than linking to newspaper sites. See here for an example.

Media bloggers, particularly of the newspaper variety are screaming their lungs out about this, blaming Google for all their troubles.

They should really blame the AP.

We, as news organizations, hand our content over to the Associated Press. The AP, in turn, hands that same content over to other newspapers and television/radio stations and they also sell our content to Google. And to Yahoo! And to our other competitors. And we pay the AP for this service. Ha! And that’s on top of the AP directly competing with newspapers on stories. Yes competing!

So this really isn’t Google’s grand scheme to bone newspapers (state wires aren’t part of the deal yet). Smart newspaper.coms have been already using AP content for the same purposes, they just haven’t figured out the scale that Google commands.

While I can sort of see the argument of Google linking our content for their own purposes as “stealing,” in this case, the only people to blame are news organizations who willfully hand their content over to their competition via the Associated Press. For a fee, mind you.

The AP worked in an age where news organizations had a strangle hold on providing general news coverage to their areas, because their geographic locations and their markets access to other, outside media sources were nil. Those times are over.

Maybe now we’ll start to understand what hyper-local actually means.

With that said, here’s some outbound links to more on this issue:

Ryan Sholin has some rational thought here.
Lucas Grindley says ‘I told you so.‘
Joe Murphy points out where newspapers should focus their energy.
Howard, at Etaoin Shrudlu, points out that AP doesn’t sell state wires.
William M. Hartnett says ‘Meh’ to the whole deal.

The end. Or is it?

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