Google and the Associated Press have teamed up to offer undergrad and graduate students the AP-Google Journalism and Technology Scholarship. The program is six $20,000 scholarships for students getting degrees that combine journalism, new media and computer science. The scholarship site advises, “If you’re on the cutting edge of digital media beyond the classroom, this scholarship is for you!” They are currently accepting applications for 2012-2013 and will announce the winners in the Spring. [Mashable]

The AP Stylebook is a guide for determining grammar and word usage in the media. This past Friday, the AP Stylebook said that the abbreviation for “electronic mail” will no longer be “e-mail.” Instead it will be “email.” Last year the AP STylebook changed “Web site” to “website.” “Language evolves. Today we change AP style from e-mail to email, no hyphen. Our editors will announce it at #ACES2011 today,” said the AP Stylebook in a tweet. [Mashable]

NBA referee Bill Spooner is suing the Associated Press and sports writer John Krawczynski over defamation that was written in a tweet. Spooner has worked as a referee for 22 years and on January 24th, Krawczynski wrote a tweet that stated the referee promised a make-up call to Minnesota Timberwolves coach Kurt Ramis.

Verve Wireless is a mobile startup company that serves as an advertising platform for local media companies. Verve has raised $7 million in a funding round led by BlueRun Ventures.

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]