Associated Press to Charge Bloggers & Aggregators…Allegedly
Taken from an April 7 post I submitted to the PROpenMic.org Forum. Updated with more current content:
Last Tuesday I opened my AdAge Daily News to find an interesting article about the Associated Press. Apparently all of these blogs and news aggregators that summarize and link to original news content are undeserving of such information because they don’t pay for it. Wall Street Journal Editor Robert Thomson went as far as claiming bloggers and news aggregators who republish content without paying a fee are “parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet.” (Interesting that they didn’t capitalize “Internet,” which is, ironically, AP style.)
Apparently nothing’s changed according to Sunday’s Anapolis.com article, which states the AP is “not trying to stifle the distribution of news, but merely wants compensation on behalf of its member organizations.”
That’s fair, I guess.
All of this information came out after an AP meeting during the Newspaper Association of America’s annual convention. Since the Seattle PI recently ceased all printing and went online, the Rocky Mountain News went under, and the fate of the San Francisco Chronicle is still unknown, is this the future of paying for our news?
A new business model must be employed to save our dailies. Even though public information we obtain from our news sources should be free, it doesn’t make sense for hardworking reporters to go without pay. Then again, charging bloggers and independent news aggregators money for every story they summarize and article they link to seems a bit excessive.
Any thoughts on the future business model of our news publications? I’m interested to see what public relations professionals think, considering about 50 percent of newspaper stories are initially generated by PR practitioners.
