Why The Associated Press plans to hold some web content off the wire

By Zachary M. Seward

In a break with tradition, The Associated Press plans to prevent members and customers from publishing some AP content on their websites. Instead, those news organizations would link to the content on a central AP website — a move that could upend the consortium’s traditional notions of syndication.

That’s one revelation from a document we obtained (labeled “AP CONFIDENTIAL — NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION”) that offers new insight into how the AP is planning to reinvent itself on the Internet.

The seven-page briefing, entitled “Protect, Point, Pay — An Associated Press Plan for Reclaiming News Content Online,” was distributed to AP members late last month. It provides greater detail about the tracking device that will be attached to AP content and describes their plans to create topic pages around news stories to rival Wikipedia and major aggregation sites. And in an hour-long interview last night, the AP’s general counsel, Srinandan Kasi, also shed light on how the consortium views reuse of its material across the Internet.

I’ll be wading through the document and what we’ve found in a series of posts beginning today. (You can subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter if you don’t want to miss anything.) We’ll eventually post the full document, too. And as we go, feel free to comment and ask questions so we can flesh this out. I think you’ll find this stuff applies to all news organizations, not just the 1,500 newspapers that own the AP.

“Utility” vs. “unique” news

There are several intertwined issues to address, but the first bit of news that caught my attention was this passage, which refers to a previously described program they’re calling “AP Protect, Point and Pay,” or AP3P:

The AP3P plan involves segmenting AP’s online products to broaden redistribution of what we call “utility” content, i.e., the type and amount of news that is quickly and easily available from other sources, to limit or prevent redistribution of the kinds of information AP provides uniquely to ensure that hypersyndication does not drive down its value, and to create a “news guide” in the form of landing pages to serve as a focal point for discovery of authoritative sources of news.

That distinction between utility and unique content immediately made me think of fair use. The AP’s position on copyright has recently been the subject of heated debate — get a flavor for it here — and this seemed like a new wrinkle in their thinking about the issue than hadn’t been previously voiced.

So was that a fair read of the passage? No, said Kasi, the AP’s general counsel, “it’s not to suggest that there’s a legal distinction.” (Though the AP has generally stopped granting interviews about their copyright stance and wouldn’t speak to me about it last month, Kasi got on the phone after I informed them we were writing about this document.) It’s less about law than search engine optimization and the link economy.

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My chat with Steve Brill about charging readers for news online

By Zachary M. Seward

It’s happening. Yesterday we revealed Steve Brill’s latest moves toward charging readers of newspaper websites, and separately, Philadelphia Inquirer publisher Brian Tierney said he would erect an online pay wall by the end of the year. Those developments followed similar statements by executives of Hearst Corp. and MediaNews Group, among other newspaper companies.

As these paid-content models develop, a key question is how the broader news ecosystem — of blogs, radio, TV, and mediums still unknown — will react to the opportunity. That subject came up in my conversation with Brill on Monday:

Me: There’s certainly a working theory out there that the minute any of those big-city papers start charging, they’re going to encourage competition that they don’t currently have. That the free blogs that are much derided now for not providing reporting will, in fact, you know, begin to put up much, much more competition—

Brill: Why? Why will they be able to? How are they going to pay for it?

Me: Perhaps by starting with a model that is, you know, that isn’t a 150-person newsroom, and so even if the end product is not as good, it’s free, and that’s sort of the hardest thing to compete with.

Brill: But again, if what you’re striving for is to get the 5 or 10 percent of your most committed readers to pay, then you can afford to have that happen. And you can’t afford not to do it.

That’s just a taste of our 23-minute chat, which you can listen to below (or download here). Much of my interview with Brill focused on slides he presented to newspaper executives last week, which I’ve embedded again after the jump. There’s also a full transcript of the conversation with some references explained by links.

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