According to Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab, AP CEO Tim Curley (pictured) recently let slip at a Hong Kong gathering of journalists that the AP hasn't even talked to Google as part of its complete overhaul of the way it syndicates content online. Why bother, when Microsoft is clearly so lethally good, online? "They know how to have a conversation," for one, unlike a certain other tech giant, plus they gave AP this, just, killer demo:

Microsoft this month has some new technology that it's unveiling that will be much more visually dramatic than anything you've seen before. Multimedia in ways you haven't thought about yet. We've seen it, we've seen the technology.

Oh, and Microsoft also just happens to have basically promised to give AP top ranking — "privileging" their content, as Nieman puts it — over other sources reporting the same news. Never mind if other sources add information to a linked AP story, or generate lots of buzz by using an AP link to launch an in-depth opinion piece. Quality = AP, always. Which is why Microsoft Bing will rule the internet, real soon now. What could possibly go wrong?

Harvard's Nieman Foundation obtained an internal AP memo showing the wire service plans to ape Wikipedia, the user-written reference that dominates many Google searches. But instead of writing its own concise summaries, like Wikipedia, AP will simply generate "landing pages" automatically, compiling basic links to its own content, and then having its members link to those pages. Robot spam! Felix Salmon of internet-loving Reuters doesn't think this will work, since Google's algorithms are pretty smart; we don't think that matters. Technical cluelessness doesn't seem to have ever sidelined an AP initiative before.

(Image via)

Thomson Reuters' media group president Chris Ahearn recently tweeted that his company "stands ready to help those who wish an alternative to the AP," the Reuters competitor that has proclaimed it is "mad as hell" at various internet fiends. AP is trying to charge people for quoting as few as five words of its content.

Ahearn has elaborated on his "alternative" in a blog post, writing that too many traditional media organizations waste manpower "recycling commodity news" and that they should instead seek to retool, including by forging a new "win-win relationship" with new media. The executive dispenses bluntly with those who would point the finger, like AP:

Blaming the new leaders... or saber-rattling and threatening to sue are not business strategies – they are personal therapy sessions. Go ask a music executive how well it works... Let's stop whining and start having real conversations.

It sounds like Ahearn has started just such a "real conversation" himself. TechDirt has already blogged back. And Reuters is even authorizing bloggers to "hyperlink" and excerpt its side of things, as God and the U.S. Code intended. Imagine that.

(CORRECTION: This post originally stated that Ahearn was president of all Thomson Reuters; in fact he is president of the firm's "media group.")

(Pic: Reuters)

The U.S.'s own ossified organizations have been grappling with Twitter strategy as well. Among traditional news media, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, New York Times and Associated Press have gone so far as to admonish staff on how to use their personal Twitter accounts; despite lacking a First Amendment, the British government's "Twitter strategy" does not go that far.

Using the AP news wire's authoritarian guidelines as a point of comparison, here's how the U.S. stacks up against Britain when it comes to Twitter rules:





How much does Twitter rock?

• British government: " The platform is experiencing a phenomenal adoption curve in the UK and being used increasingly by government departments, Members of Parliament... [it] has the potential to deliver many benefits in support of our communications objectives."
• AP:"These networks also have become an important tool for AP reporters to gather news – both for big, breaking stories and in cases in which we're seeking out members of the public who might serve as sources for our stories. And they're a prime source of citizen journalism material."

How might Twitter destroy our organization, forever?

• British government: "Inappropriate content being published in error, such as... protectively marked, commercially or politically sensitive information... Require clearance of all tweets through nominated people in digital media team."
  
• AP: "Posting material about the AP's internal operations is prohibited on employees' personal pages, and employees also should avoid including political affiliations in their profiles and steer clear of making any postings that express political views or take stands on contentious issues."

When is it terrible to befriend someone, on the internet?

• British government: "We will not initiate contact by following individual, personal users as this may be interpreted as interfering / ‘Big Brother'-like behaviour... We will, however, follow back anyone who follows our account."
• AP: "Managers should not issue friend requests to subordinates, since that could be awkward for employees. It's fine if employees want to initiate the friend process with their bosses."

Can Twitter be 'fun?' Or do 'fun' and 'failure' start the same way?

• British government: Fun=fun! "In keeping with the ‘zeitgeist' feel of Twitter, our tweets will be about issues of relevance today or events/opportunities coming soon. For example it will not be appropriate to cycle campaign messages without a current ‘hook'.
  
• AP: Fun=failure! "It's not just like uttering a comment over a beer with your friends: It's all too easy for someone to copy material out of restricted pages and redirect it elsewhere for wider viewing."
  

How, exactly, should we exploit Twitter?

• British government: "While tweets may occasionally be ‘fun', we should ensure we can defend their relation back to Our objectives. Where possible there should be an actual link to related content or a call to action, to make this credibility explicit. "
  
• AP: "Feel free to link to AP material that has been published... link to member and customer sites... try to vary the links to spread the traffic around. It's a good idea to reference the AP in the promo language. "

[Template Twitter Strategy for Government Departments]

(Pic: Carrot Creative on Twitter)

About seven-tenths of one percent of total 2008 newspaper ad revenue of $38 billion. And that's assuming the worrywarts are correct; the $250 million number was provided to the New York Times by the CEO of an anti-news piracy startup Attributor which has an interest in over-estimating the size of the problem.

So solving the piracy problem overnight would do basically nothing to fix the news industry's woes, financially speaking. Strategically, it wouldn't help much, either, since sites that illegally copy wire stories tend to be very low-stakes operations, usually Google spammers trying to make small change via AdSense (see Wired's explanatory chart). More dangerous to newspapers is the explosion in Web outlets that give news without infringing on copyrights (with the possible exception of the Huffington Post, which could stand to dial back its "excerpting" a notch).

UPDATE:Recently departed nytimes.com general manager Vivian Schiller, now at NPR, tells Newsweek that "news is a commodity:"

I am a staunch believer that people will not in large numbers pay for news content online. It's almost like there's mass delusion going on in the industry-They're saying we really really need it, that we didn't put up a pay wall 15 years ago, so let's do it now. In other words, they think that wanting it so badly will automatically actually change the behavior of the audience. The world doesn't work that way. Frankly, if all the news organizations locked pinkies, and said we're all going to put up a big fat pay wall, you know what, more traffic for us. News is a commodity; I'm sorry to say.

(Disclaimer: Attributor CEO Jim Pitkow once headed Moreover, the syndication company co-founded by Gawker Media chief Nick Denton.)

(Pic via Ioan Sameli)

The AP has also invented an amazing new "microformat," a digital wrapper for its online stories. The format will magically unearth journalistic misconduct and prevent anyone from using news in a way not pre-authorized by AP.

For example, the format preemptively warns people not to steal content, in case they were thinking about it.

It also provides the AP with an automated way to tell people when its stories are plagiarized, when the quotes are made up, and when a direct conflict of interest has been added to the story. How convenient and pracical! Here's how this will look, according to a promotional slideshow:

Finally, someone has invented a technology that allows plagiarists and cheats to confess their crimes in an automatic fashion. We predict this will work brilliantly, with no unforseen complications to inhibit its inevitable widespread use and adoption.

We've criticized the AP for knowing fuck all about the internet, blogging, and just generally relating to sentient human beings, but we have to hand it to the wire service: After changing how the world uses social media, embeds YouTube videos and sees Google, AP has done it again. We'll never look at AP news quite the same way.

(Top pic via)

The AP's Facebook and Twitter policies are less draconian than, say, Bloomberg's, but that's not saying much. They do sound, on the whole, reasonable, until you stop and ponder a few of the specifics.

For example, the organization says every comment on a staffer's Facebook profile should meet AP guidelines, because who can tell the difference between commenters and the original author??

It's a good idea to monitor your profile page to make sure material posted by others doesn't violate AP standards; any such material should be deleted.

And you, office supply assistant in the back! This applies to you too!

We cannot expect people outside the AP to know whether a posting on Facebook was made by someone who takes pictures, processes payroll checks or fixes satellite dishes.

Also, remember to distribute links fairly to the hundreds of members, and always be selling:

Link to member and customer sites instead and try to vary the links to spread the traffic around... It's a good idea to reference the AP in the promo language, i.e. Just how much geek can be chic? Test your fashion IQ with this interactive game (AP): http://bit.ly/BvAqv

Finally, no craven political posturing on social networks. That's what emails are for!

Memo below:

(Photo by Stephen Pruitt)

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Richtmyer made a head-slappingly obvious observation about the executives who turned AP member McClatchy Co. from a thriving newspaper chain into a sad penny stock (see chart, left). As quoted on Wired.com:

"It seems like the ones who orchestrated the whole mess should be losing their jobs or getting pushed into smaller quarters," Richtmyer wrote on May 28. "But they aren't."

One of Richtmyer 51 "friends" at the paranoid, insular newswire ratted him out to management for saying this very true thing, and now he's got an official reprimand for not constantly toadying up to every last AP member, no matter how vulgar. Meanwhile, Associated Press Chairman Dean Singleton continued yelling furiously (probably) that Google, one of AP's most successful clients, is a terrible corporation run by demons intent on sapping his company's precious bodily fluids. In this manner he modeled how one avoids expressing opinions that might compromise "AP's reputation as an unbiased source of news."

[Wired]

The morosely moribund newspaper industry is looking for a bailout. The government and Google are the only people with cash on hand these days; even superstar investor Warren Buffett, who owns stakes in the Post and the Buffalo News, says he won't put more money into the business.

A government handout to watchdog institutions is unseemly, so the papers are understandably targeting Google. Howard Kurtz reports in the Post that his employer is talking to Google about "improved ways of creating and presenting news online." Timesblogger Brian Stelter has Twittered that his bosses are doing the same.

Oh, so the newspapers want preening, self-important executives like Google VP Marissa Mayer to boss around their Web designers the way they do underlings at the Googleplex? Unlikely. They want cash, and soon.

It's sad that their writers are resorting to tactics they accuse bloggers of, like inventing facts out of whole cloth to serve their arguments. Take Times columnist Frank Rich, who insulted every non-newspaper journalist on the planet with this fabrication:

Just because information wants to be free on the Internet doesn't mean it can always be free. Web advertising will never be profitable enough to support ambitious news gathering. If a public that thinks nothing of spending money on texting or pornography doesn't foot the bill for such reportage, it won't happen.

Tell that to to CNET News, the tech news site which has won awards for its reporting. Or the citizen journalists of the Huffington Post, whose scoops shaped the last election. Or the experienced ink-stained wretches of Politico, some of whom worked not long ago at the Times and the Post. For that matter, the implication that journalism only happens when readers pay is nonsense. Look no further than the decades-old traditions of deep, original reporting found on radio and TV institutions like NPR and 60 Minutes, whose broadcasts come absolutely free of charge.

Kurtz, too, indulges in the occasional unreported fiction posing as fact:

Hanging over the talks is the reality that the search giant, while funneling vital traffic to news sites, vacuums up their content without paying a dime.

This "reality" is more of a collective delusion shared only by the newsrooms of America.

Then there are straight-out guilt trips: If Google doesn't pay for journalism, who will?

None of these tactics — begging, propaganda, guilt — seem to be working. That's because Googlers are smart, and they see that the newspapers have absolutely no leverage. We have a simple proposal for the executives of the Post and Times: Sue Google.

If they believe in their arguments, that Google is doing something improper with their content outside the bounds of fair use, then they should make their case in a court of law. Yes, they'll get brickbats from the blogosphere, but they're already losing in the court of opinion. And until there's a threat hanging over Google's head, there's absolutely no reason for them to open up their pocketbook.

It's a risky course. Google might respond with an alternative proposal: Instead of paying for the newspapers' headlines, why doesn't it charge them for the traffic it sends to their websites? There's ample precedent.

Larry Kramer, the newspaper executive who founded MarketWatch and now works as a venture capitalist, once told me a story about his company's dealings with Yahoo Finance. The stocks website was sending MarketWatch tons of free Web traffic through links on its site. MarketWatch executives were thrilled. But as it readied itself to go public, MarketWatch's investment bankers got nervous. What if Yahoo pulled the plug on the links? MarketWatch ended up signing a contract to pay Yahoo, in exchange for a guarantee.

Google has long resisted such pay-for-play links in its search results, segregating out commercial links as clearly marked ads. But the newspapers' whiny intransigence might test its morals. We'd like to see both sides put their money where their mouth is, and act to back up their stances — the newspapers, that content is worth paying for, and Google, that links have value. Better than this namby-pamby talk of talks.

A vice president in the AP's Chicago office sent WTNQ, a member of the AP, a cease-and-desist letter asking them to stop posting the AP's YouTube videos on its website. Frank Strovel, an employee at the AP-affiliated station, raised a fuss on Twitter, the world's best medium for complaints. That won him an interview with blogger Christian Grantham. Strovel explained that he called the AP executive who had sent the letter, a vice president of affiliate relations, and discovered he was unaware that the AP even had a YouTube channel.

Posting a video to YouTube requires the copyright holder to grant a license that allows anyone to embed the video on their website, unless one chooses to disable the embedding function. The AP has not done so — note the embed codes available on an AP report about Simpsons stamps, left.

Is this an example of what we're going to see from the AP as it attempts to pursue those who have "misappropriated" its content online, as Chairman Dean Singleton recently charged? If so, then the Internet is probably safe for a while, as the AP pursues its enemies within.

Update: AP flack Paul Colford sent this email:

There was a misunderstanding of YouTube usage when the Tennessee radio station was contacted by the Associated Press regarding the AP's more extensive online video services. No cease and desist letter was drafted or sent by AP to the station at any time. The AP was trying to offer the station a superior service for their needs.

It appears that the AP did not send a formal cease-and-desist letter. But it certainly demanded that WTNQ take down the AP's YouTube videos. And it hardly offered "superior service." On his blog, Strovel published an excerpt from the email he received from the AP executive:

I noticed you are posting our video content with out a license and have to ask you to remove the AP video content from the site ASAP. If you would like to know more about our web services please contact me.

The claim that websites which link to news stories are somehow harming them has been advanced by everyone from Journal editor Robert Thomson to AP chairman Dean Singleton. As geeks like Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera (left) have pointed out, they are blithering dunderheads who miss the point that links generate traffic to their own websites. Meanwhile, the doddering newspaper barons' cleverer lieutenants are trying to get into the business themselves.

The proof is in a new study by Hitwise, an online traffic-pattern tracker. Analyst Heather Dougherty has found that search engines, portals, social networks, and blogs generate about 40 percent of the link traffic to news websites, a proportion that has remained more or less unchanged for the past two years. Here's the chart:

Besides search engines, what generates the most traffic for news websites? Other news websites, it turns out. CNN.com, MSNBC, Fox News, the New York Times, and NBC's Weather Channel rank in the top 10 traffic sources to the news and media category, according to Dougherty's study.

Techmeme's Rivera argues that news organizations complaining about aggregators aren't just wrongheaded — they're hypocrites, too, he told CNET News:

[The] WSJ (a News Corp. property) and NYT (a key AP member) are both themselves news aggregators. Both maintain sections which quote headlines from external sites. So, constituents of these organizations already know aggregation is useful and fair. This knowledge just hasn't reached AP's and News Corp.'s leadership.

The implication: The newspaper industry's real problem isn't that sites like Google News and Techmeme exist. It's that they don't own them.

(Photo via Gabe Rivera)

Schmidt spoke today at the Newspaper Association of America's annual convention. (Can you believe they still have those?) During a Q&A after his speech, he was asked what newspapers did wrong. His response:

I think the sites are slow. They literally are not fast. They're actually slower than reading the paper, and that's something that can be worked on on a technical basis. I should also mention that at Google we're working hard to try to address the technological question that you're asking but we don't have easy answers here. This is something where better development tools, better hosting tools, and so forth from the industry as a whole will make a big difference.

Also, Schmidt applauds newspapers for adopting blogs ("That was great, you guys did a superb job") but thinks they haven't done anything since then. He asked the rhetorical question:

How do you avoid being just mediated with a set of stories that are aggregated with your brand on them, which is what's happened to some newspapers?

Exactly the question some newspapers are asking, which is why AP chairman Dean Singleton wishes people would stop Googling the news.

Luckily, Schmidt and Singleton aren't the only voices in this conversation. One of Eric Schmidt's Google underlings explored this question in depth in a related blog post today. Associate General Counsel Alexander Macgillivray's well-reasoned conclusion: He likes Phish.

The New York Times says Google is the top target here — which is confusing, because Google licenses the AP newswire and hosts its articles on its own site (such as this story about the earthquake in Italy — don't sue us, Dean!).

The AP's own statement doesn't clarify matters much. But it sounds like the AP, which is a cooperative owned by 1,400 U.S. newspapers, wants to go after Google and other online headline aggregators for misuse of all of its members' stories, not just wire copy. From the AP's press release on the move:

The Associated Press Board of Directors today announced it would launch an industry initiative to protect news content from misappropriation online....

As part of the initiative, AP will develop a system to track content distributed online to determine if it is being legally used. AP President Tom Curley said the initiative would also include the development of new search pages that point users to the latest and most authoritative sources of breaking news.

Did the AP really just say that it wanted to come up with a competitor to Google News? That's hilarious — especially considering how, for any given AP story, you'll find hundreds of identical copies online — posted by all of its paying customers, including newspapers and TV and radio stations. We can't wait to hear Singleton presiding over a meeting to decide which member's website gets the top link. It's all kind of ridiculous, since Google only recently started selling advertising on Google News, and directs massive amounts of traffic to newspaper websites.

(Photo by AP)

Associated Press managing editor Lou Ferrara reminisced.

Freelance writer Glenn Fleishman quite possibly spent more time concocting a metaphor for his work on a feature story than he did on the story itself.

Sassy conservative punditrix Michelle Malkin craved junk food, and not just the intellectual kind.

Boing Boing space-princess blogger Xeni Jardin seemed to mock her coworkers' obsession with copy protection.

Globetrotting tech-book author Sarah Lacy unleashed her gams on an unsuspecting Middle East.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

Del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter, now a Google engineer, contemplated violence. (There's some kind of thing about guns going around on Twitter! We don't get it, but we sure hope that's what Schachter's referring to!)
KNBC TV personality Shira Lazar corrupted the youth of America.
Associated Press managing editor Lou Ferrara expressed an entirely legitimate concern.
Bizarro right-wing conservatrix Michelle Malkin made it official: She is not PC.
New Yorker writer Tad Friend cried in public.

See something worth noting on Twitter? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

Here's the latest goof:

Science takes on terror hunt
A geographer uses innovative analysis to narrow Obama bin Laden's location to three sites.

That's some innovative analysis! Yahoo's news producers join a long line of Obama-Osama flubbers. In January 2007, a CNN on-air graphic for a story about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, the Al Qaeda founder, asked, "Where's Obama"? The network apologized.

During the campaign, Republican candidate Mitt Romney repeatedly confused Barack Obama's last name with Osama Bin Laden's first one. They rhyme, after all. Last April, AP board chairman Dean Singleton made the same mistake, referring to the hunt for "Obama Bin Laden," prompting a jocular rebuke by Obama.

What struck me about Hansell's piece was the use of a file photo that features a wildly grinning and unbelievably baby-faced Adelson — with professionally trimmed hair, no less! Looks a little too much like a certain viral movie marketing campaign to be a coincidence. Is the gray lady secretly synergizing with News Corp. on the latest Dark Knight release and subtly Joker-izing Adelson?