You want to know why newpaper companies are in trouble? Here is an example.
The Associated Press and its member newspapers will take legal action against Web sites that use newspaper articles without legal permission, the group said on Monday, in a clear shot at aggregators like Google.
In a speech at The A.P.’s annual meeting in San Diego, William Dean Singleton, chairman of the group, said, “We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories.”
In a statement, The A.P. said it would develop a system to track news articles online and determine whether they were being used legally.
The statement did not mention Google or any other adversary by name, but many newspaper executives have spoken recently about their concern that Google and other major aggregators and Web portals are making money from the newspapers’ work, by selling ads on news pages that turn up their articles.
News organizations have been loath to take on Google, whose search engine drives much of the traffic to their own sites. But at a time when newspaper revenue is collapsing and some papers are closing, the prospect of getting a share of Google’s revenue is more tempting than ever.
Google News shows headlines and a sentence or two of an article, but to read the entire piece, the user has to click through to the news organization’s own site. The company has argued that that limited use is allowed without permission.
As fred wilson said google is the new newsstand. Do you want to take your newspaper out of newsstand? Does AP and its newspaper members think they are the only ones reporting news out there? There are plenty of alternatives out there including other mainsream media and, dare I say, blogs. As I like to say, it is not about controlling distribution in the new digital age. It is about frictionless (not necessarily free) syndication. AP clearly doesn’t get it.
Update: Here PaidContent interviews Dean Singleton, AP chairman.