AP Exec: “To the Untrained Eye It Looks Like We’re Stupid”
by Peter Kafka
Posted on April 10, 2009 at 12:38 PM PT
Rough week for the Associated Press, at least if you measure it by headlines: First, the venerable news organization/aggregator confused the likes of me by announcing a vague plan to fight the Internet. Then it went ahead and confirmed everyone’s worst fears with a boneheaded attempt to stop someone from showing a YouTube clip it had already distributed.
Time for some image repair, don’t you think?
The AP is trying to do this at this very moment by distributing an 11-point FAQ that attempts to clarify exactly what it’s thinking. But that document is still a little vague and overly formal. Good thing I got on the phone yesterday with the pleasant Jim Kennedy, who oversees strategic planning for the AP and who speaks in clear, concise English.
Much of what we talked about was a rehash of what we talked about Monday afternoon, when AP Chairman Dean Singleton first riled everyone up with his “mad as hell” speech. But given the rampant confusion of the past few days, I thought it was worth going over again. Some excerpts from our chat:
On the AP’s plans to chase down people who “misappropriate” its content: Kennedy stresses that the news organization isn’t planning on creating a Wall Street Journal-style pay wall around its content. And it’s not concerned about bloggers who link to its stories. His beef is with sites that are reprinting AP’s stories on a regular basis without paying for them. “The activity that we’re trying to limit is the systematic harvesting of news without trying to license it,” he says. “The people who are building a business by taking the content and trying to recreate a news report. That’s what we’re trying to address. We’ve had success doing this.”
On the AP’s plan to promote its work more effectively. This has been construed in some quarters as a plan to create a search engine or news portal. But it’s really just an attempt to upgrade the AP’s search engine optimization strategy–that is, trying to get its stuff to show up higher on Google’s (GOOG) search results. It will do that via “search pages,” or “topic pages,” which are par for the course in the Web world. Check out this New York Times (NYT) page on Somali pirates, or this Huffington Post page on newspapers, and you’ll get an idea of where the AP is going.
If the search page plan works, the pages will be generating plenty of page views when people land on them, and it’s possible that the AP will sell ads on that inventory, Kennedy says. But their real function is to shuttle searchers to the original source material from the AP’s members.
On the AP’s beef with Google: It’s real. But many of the stories published this week conflated the AP’s gripe-essentially, that it’s not getting paid enough by the search engine for the use of its content–with its saber-rattling against aggregators who aren’t paying the AP at all. The AP may indeed end up suing people in the latter group. But it plans on resolving its Google problem with a new contract that will replace the one that expires this year.
Kennedy is vague when it comes to specifics about the Google contract and what he’d like changed: “It’s just a reevaluation of the situation,” he says. But he’s clear that the company intends to keep working with the world’s largest Web site. “When we’re talking about Google, we’re talking about our future business relationship,” he says. “When we’re talking about misappropriation, we’re talking about people who have never contemplated a business relationship with us.”
On the confusing message that the AP presented to the world this week: Guilty as charged, says Kennedy. But he argues that his group has indeed given some thought to what it’s doing, even if it hasn’t communicated that clearly to date. “The future is going to be a lot different than the present and the past on the Internet, and we’re trying to get ready for that process,” he says. “To the untrained eye it looks like we’re stupid. But we’re looking forward to a totally new space where we have to get ready to do things in a totally different way. We’re trying to be smart business people and we’re trying to stay in business.”
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Comments
The future will be different. The AP is likely to wither and die just as its members are doing. They may be dying because they use the AP instead of reporting the news for themselves.
Posted by Richard Frisch at April 10th, 2009 at 1:23 pmThat’s stupid: Do you think that every AP member should cover all news developments themselves? Makes plenty of sense for a local paper to cover local news, and import the rest from AP — and this part is crucial — or other sources.
Posted by Peter Kafka at April 10th, 2009 at 1:50 pmI think you’re being too kind to these very incompetent people. I understand their frustration, but it seems obvious that their plans are futile. Well, it’s kind of hard to tell what their plans are specifically, but basically despite their claims to the contrary, it is a walled garden and if they put it up they’ll have a tiny audience bringing in an inadequate amount of revenue that will slowly shrink to zero.
Their content has value, which is why people want to read it, but it doesn’t have enough value to make people jump through stupid hoops to read it, especially since it’s impossible to prevent it from being distributed outside their wall.
Posted by Bjorn Tipling at April 10th, 2009 at 4:14 pmBjorn, where’ the walled garden here? What hoops will you have to jump through to read the AP stories?
Posted by Peter Kafka at April 10th, 2009 at 5:44 pmI think you’re confusing the relationships they have with their publishers (and with aggregators like Google), with the one they have with readers. They require the former to pay them if they want to use their content, and they let the latter group read them for free. Pretty much the way it works throughout the Web, no?
Google pays AP. Google could also pay the newspapers. That’s better for newspapers than trying to make money off of AdSense (AdCents). Then that would give Google more incentive to monetize Google News, maybe by charging a subscription, (because they won’t be able to monetize it via AdSense, they’ll be in the same boat as the newspapers) and thus a virtuous cycle is born of money funding more content, which attracts more people to the Internet (Google).
If there is nothing new on the Internet then there is nothing to do. Without news, there’s just web surfing e-commerce sites, and checking out people’s hobby sites, not very compelling…
Posted by Tom Foremski at April 10th, 2009 at 6:24 pmPeter, by wanting to limit where and via what site I can read their news, in effect they are putting themselves within a walled garden. If I can only read excerpts in Google Reader and have to click through to the site, for example, then as far as I’m concerned that qualifies as having to jump through a hoop. And as aggregators become more sophisticated and diffused and as new types of news services and applications for devices come around they’ll be left in the dust. Who’s going to bother opening up their mobile phone’s web browser to read AP news when the same news from a different provider could be read in an app of the users choice with a UI that works for them.
Already I don’t subscribe to any CNN or nytimes rss feeds, because it’s just excerpts.
The more they want to control distribution of bits they ‘own’ the more of a competitive disadvantage they put themselves in.
Posted by Bjorn Tipling at April 10th, 2009 at 6:28 pmThe internet almost destroyed the Porn Industry with free content. Then the Gov. required age verification, which could only be done, easily, with credit cards. Thus the age of Porn subscription where they have to compete equally with each other.
The Gov. has just mandated all digital TV which just about knocks off free Broadcast, replaced by subscription Cable, DBS or Telco. Therefore I’m paying for Arod’s Yankee contract when they sign content contracts with the TV service.
News just has to get the Gov. to create a law, to survive.
Posted by Jeff Stevens at April 11th, 2009 at 7:06 am“To the untrained eye, it looks like we’re stupid.”
Astounding. AP knows what it’s doing, the rest of us are just too dumb to understand their grand plan.
What a brilliant strategy: After a week of insulting its customers, AP tries to make amends by… insulting its customers.
AP: Go back and try again on your IP FAQ. Leave out the Dilbertisms and management-speak. Stay away from vague terms like “rights-based services” and “search pages” until you’re actually prepared to define what all of it means. Your follow-up definitions in the FAQ are filled with obfuscation, not clarification.
If you need help with this, ask any of your editors in the news division–they’re pretty good at writing things that make sense to the unwashed masses.
Posted by Aaron Weiss at April 11th, 2009 at 9:37 am