The Chairman of The Associated Press said that he is “mad as hell” about those who “walk off with our work.”  Unlike The Associated Press, rival Thomson Reuters embraces blogs.  At least according Thomson Reuters’ President of the Media Group Chris Ahearn.

In a Reuters guest column written by Ahearn, the executive wrote: “To start, yes the global economy is fairly grim and the cyclical aspects of our business are biting extremely hard in the face of the structural changes. But the Internet isn’t killing the news business any more than TV killed radio or radio killed the newspaper. Incumbent business leaders in news haven’t been keeping up. Many leaders continue to help push the business into the ditch by wasting ‘resources’ (management speak for talented people) on recycling commodity news. Reader habits are changing and vertically curated views need to be meshed with horizontal read-around ones.”

I applaud Ahearn for embracing blogs.  The barriers to entry for online journalism are decreasing.  And the First Amendment backs them up.  Threatening to sue those that use the words of an Associated Press article may not be the best business strategy according to the Reuters exec.

“Blaming the new leaders or aggregators for disrupting the business of the old 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.”

Ahearn said that a better approach to handling borrowing one another’s content is by giving credit where it is deserved.  When I quote from the Associated Press, I personally link to their articles and report that the AP deserves credit.  Does the AP always give credit back?  No.

Here is a news story about former Facebook application Scrabulous being renamed Wordscraper by the Associated Press.  Who broke the story?  Pulse2.  Who are the ones that gave us credit? Mashable and Ars Technica.  Who didn’t give us credit?  The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press.  Treat those how you would like to be treated, Associated Press.

Richard Richtmyer is a news writer for a Philadelphia-based newspaper.  On the Facebook social network, Richtmyer simply stated an opinion about how he thought Associated Press executives should be punished for negatively affecting the McClatchy Company stock.

“It seems like the ones who orchestrated the whole mess should be losing their jobs or getting pushed into smaller quarters,” stated Richtmyer on Facebook in late May. “But they aren’t.”  One of his 51 Facebook friends ratted him out to a higher ranked employee and eventually Richtmyer was reprimanded.

Today McClatchy is a penny stock.  Two years ago the company spent $4.5 billion to buy another publication company called Knight Ridder.  After buying Knight Ridder, McClatchy started looking to sell off several Philadelphia papers including The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News.

The Associated Press union was not happy with Richtmyer being reprimanded and warned all other employees to be careful who they choose to add as friends on the social network.

“We have seen about six Facebook problems over the last two months, with employees — maybe managers you have as friends — reporting potential issues to management,” stated union guild chief Kevin Keane in a memo to other members. “You must be careful who you allow on as friends.”

The News Media Guild believes that the AP needs to fine tune their policy in how they handle these types of situations and they are also pushing for Richtmyer’s reprimand to be removed.

[via Wired]

“They will not get our copy going forward,” stated Associated Press CEO Tom Curley.

Tom Curley wants Google to strike a proper deal with the Associated Press going forward otherwise they plan to cut off the search engine company from their articles.  These remarks may be a follow-up to legal actions that William Dean Singleton mentioned earlier.

The company said that they are planning to create landing pages that redirect users away from secondary sources that post original content from the Associated Press.

The Associated Press is owned by several news organizations.  The Associated Press is paid undisclosed sums of money from Google for spreading their content across Google News.  However many other blogs and news websites simply steal content from the A.P. and spread it on their website which can be found on Google News itself too.

[via Forbes]

The Associated Press and their subsidiaries will now begin taking legal action against websites that aggregate their content without permission. One of the clear aggregate suspects is Google News.

“We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories,” stated William Dean Singleton, Chairman and CEO of MediaNews Group and a board of director on the AP. The AP will develop a system that will track articles online to see if they are being used legally.

The statement that was made by the AP did not specifically mention any of the companies that they are taking a stand against.

Google News shows the headlines and a couple of sentences of the article in the title, but anyone that wants to read the whole article has to click through the website. Google has argued that this limited use does not require permission.

The AP itself has an agreement with Google for their content to appear on Google News, but many other newspaper companies do not. This action is more of a “newspaper industry initiative” that is being led by the AP. Over 1,400 United States member newspaper owns the AP collectively.

The AP has about 4,100 employees and made about $710 million in revenue in 2007. In late February, Google started placing advertisements on their News website.

[via NYT]

“Mobile is actually a better way to reach people than print or even Web. It’s versatile, immediate, travels and is just as compelling–if it’s done right–as a Web site or a printed page,” stated Art Howe, CEO of Verve Wireless Inc.

Verve Wireless Inc. provides mobile software called Verve Publishing Platform.  This platform is used heavily by online newspaper companies such as The Associated Press, the New York Times, The Boston Globe, etc.  These online newspaper companies have used Verve’s platform to create iPhone versions of their sites.  Verve currently powers 4,000 newspapers across 140 publishers with their software.

The Associated Press signed on with Verve this past May and decided that they were going to invest in the company since they were happy with the platform.  Iron Capital and Crosscut Ventures joined Associated Press in the $3 million Series B investment in Verve Wireless.

The founders of Verve Wireless are Tom Kenney and Art Howe.  Both of them raised $2.5 million in seed funding to get the company up and running.  The Verve Publishing Platform is available for free to the newspaper publishing companies, but they take a cut out of advertising revenue.  Verve competes with Crisp Wireless.  Crisp represents Hearst, Gannett, and Tribune Interactive.

Related Links:
1. Verve Wireless
2. NYT
3. Associated Press

The talk of the blogging town is that The Associated Press sent a cease and desist to 7 DMCA takedown notices to The Drudge Retort.  However, Jim Kennedy, VP and Strategy Director of The Associated Press rethought their position and felt they acted “heavy-handed.”  The Associated Press will be rethinking their position on bloggers.  The shift in policy happened shortly after the blogosphere reacted negatively to the AP’s stance.

Jay Adelson’s Stance On The A.P.
Not everyone reacted negatively towards the AP.  “While I definitely love the idea of syndication and democratization of information, I tend to sympathize with the A.P.,” Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg and Chairman of Revision3 told The New York Times. “It is their decision how their content gets used.”

“The way we designed Digg was to protect copyright owners, not abuse them,” added Adelson. “Digg’s job is to direct you to the source.”

Sometimes Digg receives requests to take down posts that violate DMCA copyright protection and they conform.  It doesn’t happen often, but it still happens.  Digg users that constantly violate DMCA copyright infringement gets their account banned.  Reddit has never received a DMCA copyright infrigement takedown notice.

———
Update:  Jay Adelson added this as a comment in response to the article [Thanks Sebastian (comment #1).
A couple of clarifications:

1) We are not supporting A.P.’s position, by any stretch. I mean by my comment that we honor copyright law and ownership, which is why Digg doesn’t host content in the first place, merely directs to it.

2) We enforce copyright infractions when we receive an official and verifiable DMCA takedown notice. Our process is totally transparent – when we act on such a notice, we direct the original links to Chilling Effects where the notice can be viewed.
———

Jason Calacanis’ Stance On The A.P.
Jason Calacanis, founder of Weblogs Inc. and Mahalo on the other hand, has a difference in opinion from Adelson.  Calacani stated:

“We’ve never had a policy for this at Netscape or Mahalo because it is absurd, and we don’t waste time making rules for absurd behavior. If you’re linking to someone with their headline it’s clearly a small fraction of the overall work, used for navigational purposes, doesn’t confuse the public, and doesn’t impinge on the originators ability to do commerce. If the case passes all those tests with flying colors than you’re just abusing the legal system. If you were to take EVERY SINGLE AP news headline and quite 200-300 words automatically I could see them complaining, but we’re talking about 20-80 word quotes.”

My Stance On The A.P.
Traditional media outlets have been taking a hit lately since the rise of enterprise blogging.  Everyone is stealing content from everyone else and making it their own.  If you quoted all of my original material and did not link back to my site, I’d obviously be pissed too.

If The Drudge Report did not link directly to the Associated Press or did not even mention that the work belong to the Associated Press, then they acted unfairly and deserved the DMCA takedown notice.

By linking back to the original owner of the material, it is ethical because you are telling the reader that the content on your site does not exclusively belong to you.  And linking to the original owner is beneficial for your traffic ranking and drives more people to your site.  This also leads to higher monetization.  And who in their right mind says no to extra money that someone helps you make?