“AP Gateway will serve as the launching pad for new products and services from AP and other interested news publishers,” Tom Curley, president and CEO of The Associated Press, said today at the annual meeting of the Colorado Press Association. “It will allow the news industry to deliver the news directly to the consumer in a variety of exciting new ways.”
Jane Seagrave, senior vice president and new chief revenue officer of AP, said the first set of products from the new Gateway unit would be applications for several new devices that have been introduced or announced in recent weeks, including the Apple iPad.
In developing new digital product and service opportunities, AP Gateway will tap AP’s previously announced News Registry, a service for tagging news content with usage rights and source attribution. Publishers using the services of the Registry, now in beta operation with more than 200 participating newspapers, will be able to opt into opportunities developed by the AP Gateway business unit.
AP Gateway expands the work started by AP in 2008, when it launched an initiative to ingest news content from AP members, categorize it and tag it with rich metadata. That aggregation of AP and member content enabled the launch of AP Mobile, a set of services for smart phones that feature AP content and local news from more than 1,000 member newspapers and broadcasters.
William Dean Singleton, chairman of the AP Board of Directors and chairman and chief executive officer of MediaNews Group said in the press release, “We’ve already seen the power of the AP Cooperative in AP Mobile, among the most popular news applications for smart phones worldwide. AP Gateway builds on the strength of the Cooperative in the era of digital publishing.”
The announcement of AP Gateway comes less than a year after AP announced the News Registry, a platform for tagging, setting rights and tracking usage of news content across the Internet. The Registry will move out of beta operation this year and be open to all AP members and broadcasters by year’s end.
Over the past six years, AP has transformed its content creation, processing and distribution methods to make it easier for members of the news cooperative to take advantage of the new ways consumers are accessing news and information. At the heart of AP’s new platform is a searchable, multimedia database of AP content that members can access using flexible, Web-based portals.
“AP Gateway is the natural extension of our ongoing digital strategy,” said Curley in his Denver announcement. “Rather than just repurpose our content across formats, we now have a real opportunity to innovate and create differentiated experiences of the news across formats that will excite all of us, from producers to consumers of news.”
Curley also said that AP immediately would begin seeking feedback from members and customers.
Source: The Associated Press
Can’t wait to see the app. The size and power of the ipad should bring about some awesome apps.
Ah… iPad is a launch pad!
This will be interesting to watch. The iPad will allow the legacy news organizations to toy with their very existence, by restricting their content to paid apps on the iPad (and presumably elsewhere). This will allow other sites, which keep all their content online and freely available, to flourish as a result.
Apple’s iPad allows the legacy news bodies to try their experiment, without incurring any significant risk for Apple if that experiment fails – people will just keep visiting other news websites on the iPad’s browser instead.
Also, regarding the “News Registry” mumbo-jumbo mentioned in the article, this sounds like Associated Press’ pipe dream of trying to “DRM” the news.
I won’t pay for something I can get for free on a 1,000 other web pages.
Great, now we can get propaganda and fake news images in full multi media.
What’s interesting is that those who offer opinions on matters like this often do so from a position of ignorance and yet presume to understand.
In a Pew Research study conducted last year on Media they did a study of Baltimore. They found that 96% of the news in that city began with the daily newspaper. It may well be true that government agencies and other official outlets of news will find their information spread by an army of underpaid bloggers but many other stories come from on the street journalism created through institutional memory (the collective experience and contacts of reporters) and a collaborative process that news organizations use to produce content.
Content is regularly stolen, paraphrased, and reproduced. They’re just ‘facts’ after all, right? Not quite. Many stories of any value come from news organizations that develop the content themselves. Today, stories of this type are linked to on a website and given attribution. That may be ending.
Short form, breaking news items will still flow through the Twitterverse and Facebook fan pages but longer form, exclusive stories, that provide depth, insight, and offer more value will go behind pay walls.
The reason is pure economics. Most blogs, don’t make money. Twitter has yet to make any money. So simply being used to something doesn’t mean it will be there in the future.
Newspapers and other news organizations have lasted for a very long time because they could be economically sustained.
Content if stolen will be taken to litigation. Not many small websites want to go to court for copyright violation.
The iPad is ushering in an age in which you will pay something (as we used to) for good quality news and information.
Remember Napster? Remember people saying that the music business was dead since it was all free now?
That was 10 billion downloads ago.
@ PR – I’d agree with your first statement, and invite you to techdirt.com to learn about business models which don’t rely on turning back the clock and pretending that content can be protected from copying. The genie is out of the bottle, and there are quite a few new opportunities for those who are willing to adapt and change.
@PR
Right on.
To you folks who think you are getting good quality information for free, remember what your grandparents told you, you get what you pay for.
Look at broadcast and cable television where “news” has been reduced to a bunch of loud mouth hacks who spout forth their opinions and label it as “news”.
I would really like to be able to buy, for a reasonable price, some “real” news service on an iPad.
another $30.
Isn’t it ironic that the iPad may usher in the age of no more free information.
I’m not opposed to subs, but the management of AP has moved decidedly to the Right Wing after decades of playing it down the middle.
I also have no problem with partisan editorial writing as long as it does not pretend to be neutral.
Daily Koz, FDL, World Net Daily and Drudge are very political and make no pretention to be otherwise.
During the last couple of years, AP has had it’s lunch eaten and ass kicked by McClatchy on Washington coverage because the AP has been all too happy to be a Beltway Villager.
I won’t pay for that.
@Gabriel,
I read some of what your link presented.
I have yet to see any model that makes news on the web a universally sustainable proposition. There is no standalone news website (by standalone I mean site without another or existing affiliation) that does what old line news organizations do, that is profitable. Show me any site that does it’s own reporting, with a staff that must be funded at a professional level generating a profit from it’s online advertising alone.
There’s a lot of talk and hand wringing and conjecture about finding a workable business model but in a world of tens of thousands of sources and $5 per thousand ad rates (if you are lucky) you can’t make it work.
The old model was, as you allude to, based on scarcity. We are now in a state of oversupply. This, coupled with the fact that the sheer physics of vision and the size of most online ads are limiting factors. Hard to attract or intrigue someone in an ad the size of a matchbook.
It’s likely that content will see a split between short burst facts into the twitterverse and longer form depth or feature content you will need to pay to access. If it’s made easy enough, complete enough and accurate, and coupled with other content you like it’s not unlikely you’ll pay to get it.
The chilling effect of lawsuits on content theft may come as a surprise but old media is not going to simply roll over. Only by offering higher quality content, protecting it, and creating a kind of scarcity can those companies preserve the value and pay to have it created in the first place.
If there ARE models that you think have merit please detail them.
The fact that the entire media world has been searching for them for some time shouldn’t dissuade you.
Jeff Jarvis, Steve Outing and many others have discussed their vision of the future of journalism, talked about BackFence and other citizen journalism models that have yet to scale. Newspaper Next and others have explored ideas in which the advertiser creates their own ad (doesn’t work). Certainly the pull of attention (and lack of innovation and capital to explore it) keeps old line news companies from building the new models, even those with promise.
The ipad offers a platform that makes copying harder. Have you tried to copy content from an app? Not the web…but an app? it’s awkward at best. If I see a news app that shows me a video analysis of a favorite quarterback’s throwing motion, coupled with an interview before the big game, in addition to a fantasy football league, exclusive photos and video of past games, and offer this at a reasonable price. I’ll pay. If that content is presented in a format that ALSO permits BIGGER ads and BETTER ads (more interactive, more content)…then advertisers will pay because the value is there. That’s what the iPad can bring to the table.
Any other purely web based news will keep wallowing in an uncertain, shifting, and massive pool of sites all competing for attention amid the the shifting sands of optimization tuned to the latest algorithms all for a diminishing profit margin.
@ deepdish,
“I won’t pay for something I can get for free”
I said that too, then I got married anyway. Some people never learn.
It will be great to see those that try to DRM news fall on their faces, and waste $$, after seeing that it doesn’t work. These companies have to realize that the consumer is not ignorant and stupid. We can find other sources of news for free and/or at a more reasonable charge.
@ Bib Als MPB
Re “”I won’t pay for something I can get for free”
I said that too, then I got married anyway. Some people never learn.”
I as well. Perhaps ‘it’ should never be free.
Then we would learn to :
1. Appreciate the value of a dollar
2. Learn to manage our money better
3. Get what we want, when, where and how we want it
4. Get it more often
Problem is, we have to change society, i.e., take the checkbook back from our wives.
“The chilling effect of lawsuits on content theft may come as a surprise but old media is not going to simply roll over. “
You cannot copyright facts. A specific written VERSION of the telling of a story, yes, but you cannot copyright the facts behind a story.
Just linking to a story, telling the world that the NYT has a story about this-and-that isn’t copyrightable, either. Nor is the summary such a link would be surrounded with, as long as it is not a direct quote – and even THAT can be done, too. That’s called fair use.
Perhaps you should have read TechDirt a little closer.
You’ll need to distinguish between news and journalism, such as in depth investigative journalism. The latter CAN be copyrighted and put behind a pay wall, and people will even pay for it, since it is unique content. That’s TechDirt’s point.
Raw news, not so much, people will go to where they can get that for free.
That’s what makes this so hard, trying to get the mix just right – how much unique content can we put behind a pay wall, and how much to put out front for other sites to link to, so we can draw people into our site?
Anybody that either tries to put RAW news behind a pay wall, or sues to stop other sites linking to their news is an idiot and deserves to fail.
Which they will.
@rwahrens
Thanks for agreeing with me. That’s correct, raw news cannot be copyrighted. But let’s break that down.
What is meant by raw news? A reporter gets a tip and follows up, does a story. Are the facts as revealed then free for anyone to reproduce as long as they paraphrase? Or not?
Or are you referring to a press conference with 100 reporters and an equal number of stories?
Or are you referring to information as produced by government agencies which is already ‘public’ by definition?
What I’m referring to is that broadly covered news, public information and multiply sourced data WILL likely remain free. But as you correctly point out, in depth journalism you will likely need to pay for.
So…fast forward 7 years. The number of news sources has exploded into a constantly shifting mass of essentially personal sites, some survive based on their geographic specifics, many others come and go. A few major sources remain offering a mix of in depth reporting and other data that is available to anyone. You have a subscription to two of them at $8 a month. Where do you spend your time? On the service you pay for that has ALL this material or a few free favorites that only give you what everyone else has?
It’s also a question of attention saturation. How much time do you have to absorb information? 12 to 14 hours a day often looking at a screen?
The real question is about money. Where does it come from? Who pays for the reporter in Santiago to report on the earthquake? What would happen if we simply took Dragon Dictation, hooked it up to Fox News or CNN and then
paraphrased what they reported minutes later? Is that ethical? Or is the idea of ethics old fashioned and no longer applicable?
If MDN for example charged, you’d go to Apple Insider since it was free, even though you might miss the ‘takes’ but taking it further, if MDN had exclusive access to some information, prevented deep linking, the walled garden would likely be worth MORE than the miniscule return on the ads.
You can look at Rupert Murdoch and suggest he’s out of touch and repeat the tired phrases “the genie’s out of the bottle” and “Information wants to be free” but they truly have little meaning.
A lawsuit doesn’t have to be successful to have an effect. How many “news bloggers” now feeding off the television, radio and newspaper website sources would keep going if they had to pay an attorney a retainer?
Funny that you start out with the kind of thing that usually results in an in depth investigation.
Raw news is “stuff” happening that we see all over the place, every day, that isn’t limited to the investigation of one reporter. Yes, one news outlet often breaks the story, but others jump on it and cover it too. Newspapers have been doing this for decades, and haven’t gotten into copyright fights over it. Nor will new outlets on the internet, for the same reason.
The FACTS of the news cannot be copyrighted, while YOUR unique investigation and its resulting story can. It won’t take long for idiots like Murdock to realize that he’s spitting in the wind with lawsuits. It’ll be like whack-a-mole, he can’t sue *everybody*.
However, other news outlets can talk about it, link to it if you haven’t put it behind a pay wall. They will, too, as has been happening in the news business for decades.
Murdock’s efforts will fail. Why? Because most of what he wants to put behind his paywall is still just normal, raw news. Stuff I can go elsewhere for, for free. He still hasn’t gotten the message that what we WILL pay for is unique content. What his reporters write about the disaster in Haiti isn’t unique, every Tom, Dick and Harry on the internet is writing about that.
But if his reporters do an in depth investigation on corruption in say, Congress, or the White House, THEN I’ll be willing to go behind a paywall to read it. Why? Because it’s something nobody else is writing about. Because he’ll be talking to sources no one else has access to.
So the answer is just what TechDirt says, sell scarcity. Sell unique content – investigative reports, famous columnist’s columns, Interviews with famous people, in depth travel commentaries, etc.
I am sure that a dedicated, smart journalistic staff can come up with all sorts of stuff that can make a site unique – hell, magazines have been doing it for a very long time.
But that’s not NEWS, its journalism, and you’ll not be able to sell news. It’s too available anywhere. Newspapers are not used to this kind of competition, it’s always been too expansive for newspapers in other cities to circulate to places outside of their own city. Not every paper has the resources of the NYT. But the internet means that I can see the headlines of every newspaper in the country, and many in other places outside of this country. So newspapers will never be able to charge for their websites. The websites for competitors are too available.
“Is that ethical? Or is the idea of ethics old fashioned and no longer applicable?”
Oh, come on. Newspapers have been jumping on news stories broken by rivals for years. They’ve just been smart enough to paraphrase instead of plagiarize. That’s always been considered ethical as well as legal.
The major news stories will always be covered by the big names, for the same reason it always has – it costs money to put reporters on the scene, and only the big companies have that kind of resources to do it. And the little guys will still link to their sites, paraphrasing their news, because the little guys will be news aggregators, and lots of people want that.
So that’s why I and lots of other people won’t spend a lot of time behind a paywall. I’ll go to the places that aggregate the news, that summarize it, and if I want a closer look, I’ll go to where they link to for that more in depth read. A smart outfit like, say, CNN, won’t put that story behind a paywall, because they know the little guys will be sending viewers their way.
They’ll be putting *unique* stuff behind that paywall, not stuff I can read anywhere.
As I mentioned, this will be paid for how?
Online advertising is currently running somewhere between 10 cents per thousand pageviews and $15…with the emphasis on the low end. The average online reader is only worth 1/40th to 1/10th that of a print reader given the rates charged for advertising. Couple that with the fact that online ads are measurably less effective (for a variety of reasons) and you find that the news ecosystem as it is currently shaped falls apart. The idea that people will go to news aggregators presumes that the sources they pull from will even be there.
Quite an assumption given the well recognized fact that newspapers produce the most news in most communities. Television stations sometimes do feature reports and investigative pieces but these are shrinking too. So news partnerships have formed. Good luck with that.
I wouldn’t bet against Rupert Murdoch. BTW…he doesn’t have to sue “everybody” just a few high profile cases is enough. The smaller sources can be ignored, they won’t impact the audience or profit margins. When they do, and they step over, they get served…in high profile.
Here’s an interesting example
Do a search on the phrase
Iran moves nuclear fuel
You’ll find a number of links of course…including this one
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/02/27/iran-moves-nuclear-stockpile-to-above-ground-facility/
While they LINK to the New York Times story
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/27/world/middleeast/27iran.html?hp
What happens when the Times goes behind a paywall (and they will)?
The hotair blog buys a subscription and then paraphrases?
In this case they literally cut and pasted a chunk of the Times
story.
If it become economically non viable to produce the news in the manner it is produced now the news you get will change. A reliance on “official” reports will become dominant (they’re free), and the quality of the reporting will fall.
There are lots of local newspapers that aren’t going out of business. CNN seems to be doing quite well, both on air and online. Not all news outlets are hurting.
The Wall Street Journal seems to be doing ok, too, and plenty of people seem quite satisfied to subscribe to their site. As I said, unique is the key.
Just because Rupert Murdock is an idiot doesn’t mean that the news industry is going down the tubes, it just means that he’s greedy.
I wish him luck – he’s going to need it.
@ pr
Hot Air has done nothing illegal. It is simply commenting on the NYT article which they quoted in part and properly linked it to.
If Hot Air had published the Times story in full or a significant portion of it and presented it as their own, sell it without authorization as a copy or diminished the value of the original article, damn right they are in trouble.
Why do you suggest that the Times will plagiarize somebody else’s work? They have their own reporters and if caught, as some have, there are retributions.
@mdmac
Don’t misunderstand. I am not suggesting they’ve done anything wrong under the current structure. This is how things have evolved.
It’s based on the equation
More Pageviews=Advertising Revenue.
Most sites today use Pageviews as a primary metric. While CTR (click through rate) is important, and Time Spent are useful and have value the model is still based on eyeballs getting presumed exposure to the ad. It’s the serendipity model. You don’t go to the site to see the ad. You go for the content. The ad appears in association with content. The other primary model is search based that Google has taken to high art. While news sites can use the contextually senstive model that AdSense provides it doesn’t provide much revenue.
What I am pointing out is that once the Times goes behind the paywall sites like this…the free ones…will be able to COMMENT on the content, as they do, even paraphrase the facts, but to the extent that they drain off readership for the site that originated the content the people who paid to get the information created will be less able to do so.
The web is simply not exceptionally lucrative for news providers and there are no models on the horizon that will make it so…EXCEPT
putting content of depth, uniqueness, and quality on a platform like the iPad, made harder to easily steal, and enforced with high profile legal action.
While units of unique content, in the form of music were easily curtailed by legal action and threats of it from the RIAA, when iTunes appeared it just made it EASIER. So I guess my point is that while raw news can’t be protected in the same way (and won’t be) if the providers give you both the RAW news AND better quality content in an attractive package with depth, the paywall makes it worth it for both the provider and the consumer.
One more note on this…
As I mentioned, legal precedent is what matters…not “suing everybody”
You can gain some insight from this story.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2011202624_ryan28.html?prmid=op_ed
Oh, please, Italy? That story has no bearing on what’s happening in the US, because Google has immunity through the safe haven’s provisions of the DMCA. That prosecution could never happen here.
Just what that means to the current discussion isn’t real clear, care to expand on your point?
Oh, and a prosecution by the State is not the same as a lawsuit by a private party. No precedent at all.