There are only a couple of dozen significant US news gathering organizations that operate nationally and/or internationally: the TV and cable networks, the NYT, WaPo, WSJ, LAT (so far), AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, NPR, and so on. Of these, the print outfits do by far the lion;s share of collecting. Recently, Michael Kinsley wisecracked that if the NYT disappeared, there would still be news, so presumably someone would cover it. Maybe so, but it would cost a lot of money — a whole lot more than Huffington, Slate, Salon, Drudge, RedState, TPM, Politico, Memeorandum and other larger websites’ budgets put together.

There are a lot of ways to structure a system of reasonable payment. Huffington can subscribe to AP, just as the Hartford Courant does. Smaller sites can pay a flat fee, based on traffic. Perhaps Google and other providers of publishing tools can foot the bill for the thousands of small bloggers and pass part of the cost through by taking it off the top of ad revenue. There’s a way. To ignore the issue and complain that the Internet deserves to be free won’t cut it. Unlike music, TV and film producers who arguably gain over time through the exposure of their products to unlimited audiences, AP’s content and that of other news organizations has virtually no value beyond the moment of its delivery — because it’s NEWS.

To be fair to the real Drudge, all they ever do is link out to stories. Every now and again they’ll have an “exclusive” but it has been a LONG time since their last one.

Ultimately, the remaining organizations will avoid the level of duplication of effort we still see now. Part-timers and councils of volunteers with narrow passions will fill certain gaps.

Why are there dozens and dozens of people at political press conferences and in sports press boxes? This expensive physical presence affords us what, exactly? Why is a TV reporter standing outside of a dark empty courtroom for the 1104 pm news segment on the latest trial?

And likely, good content will start to cost something. How come the WSJ has managed not to give its product away for free?

Oh, one more thing. Don’t pretend to be shocked by THIS inevitable development which may act as a partial financing vehicle. Wait for it. It’s not a question of if. It’s a question of when. OK. Ready?

internet usage taxes.

BTW, not advocating. merely predicting.

But you can’t have blanket licenses, because the A.P. charges news orgs TONS of money to use their content. And they get to reprint the articles in full, serve ads with it and go on their merry way.

There would have to be a second tier of pricing for using a portion of the content, and it would have to be for everything. But, again, that would be such a slippery slope that the A.P. would have to create some type of auto-check against the content and provide bloggers enough value to jump through those hoops. I don’t personally use their content enough to justify the cost, and I doubt many other bloggers do either.

Another thing, the A.P. is trying to punish those who push traffic back to the news sources that buy their content and that’s just a losing proposition from the start. But hey, they can try. They won’t be happy with the results.

Now, here’s a thought…

Singers, musicians, recording artists of all kinds have always been paid by direct sales of their recordings–but there are also organizations like ASCAP and BMI that make some sort of effort to track usage of recorded materials. There was a time when it was pretty commonplace to find an ASCAP sticker on the front window of a business–restaurants, health clubs, book stores–in which recorded music was piped in to enhance this commercial enterprise. The business owners, if I understand, don’t pay on a per-use basis, because that would be too difficult to track; instead, they just pay a “blanket fee” for the license, it allows them to use content to their heart’s desire, and the collected fees are then split up and distributed to recording companies, artists, writers, publishers etc.

Could a similar system work for news content? Bloggers like Justin pay a nominal “licensing fee” up front, and those fees are then split up between AP, UPI, Reuters, and all other news gatherers, and news organizations.

Any thoughts?

Agnostick
agnostick@excite.com

No matter how much content they create, blogs and even television news rely on the foot soldiers of news gathering, which is primarily the print journalists and the news services like AP.

To deny this is shortsighted

1. If AP and other pro media outfits can’t generate revenue to pay its reporters, everyone will suffer: bloggers, citizens, our culture. I don’t say this to defend the AP’s approach in this particular instance. At the same time, I contend that the failing business model that finances journalism is a problem that will have to be addressed. (So, for example, saying that “this is the information age” doesn’t speak to anything relevant. Not unless you believe that there really is such a thing as a free lunch.)

2. This approach by AP won’t work. If they focus on protecting their verbatim content, bloggers will stop the practice of quoting excerpts and providing a link. Instead, they will compose their own stories based on a variety of media sources. That’s not very hard to do, will decrease eyeballs to major media sites, and isn’t copyright protected. A place like AP has a copyright on the particular words that they use to describe an event. But they don’t have a copyright on events that have transpired or words that have been spoken by public figures.

If I write a story that says that “AP reports that President Obama said that the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog, there’s really not a fricken thing AP can do about it. If bullied on that point, bloggers and other writers can simply recede safely into the paraphrasing weeds.

To the extent that the major media and bloggers have an adversarial relationship, we both fail to see the nature of the problem and find a way to address it. We need a new model that preserves professional reporting as a viable enterprise. Major media must accept even more change. And bloggers must acknowledge that whatever blogging’s merits, there is a parasitical component to blogging which must be refined. If blogging is a parsite that kills its host, where will the new hosts come from? Bloggers must be beneficial parasites that keeps the media honest, clean, and viable.

BTWm IMO, anyone who says that bloggers and citizen journalists can replace the caliber, scope, and breadth of pro journalism is kidding themselves.

I use AP stories occasionally, but there is seldom a need for me to rely solely on them. With Google News I can find multiple sources for the same story in seconds. I always give a link to my sources not matter how much I use, so they certainly aren’t missing out on the credit.

Go ahead AP, tell me I can’t share the news I read from your newsstand. I’ll just go to one of the thousands next door.