More on aggregators, agencies, and newspapers

Posted by Martin Stabe on 10 April 2007 at 15:46
Tags: Associated Press, Google, Newspapers, Tribune Company

Writing for the Baltimore Sun, Jay Hancock weighs in to this weekend’s debate in the blogosphere about Sam Zell and Google:

if Zell’s aim is to change newspapers’ business model rather than their content, he might be on to something.

The problem isn’t the journalism; soaring Web readership proves that. The problem is getting paid for it in the Internet Age.

Hancock also addresses newspapers’ new relationship with the agencies, who are suddenly in direct competitors online:

Why do newspapers pay the Associated Press to distribute their expensive, hard-won stories to radio, TV, Yahoo and other enemies of newspapers?

Newspapers run AP as a collective, but the interests of AP and its members have never been further apart.

It’s well worth a complete read, since all the same debates affect us here in Britain as well. Zell has only reignited all of this with his comments. None of these debates will be going away any time soon.

Google makes nice with the wires

Posted by Martin Stabe on 10 April 2007 at 14:26
Tags: Agence France Presse, Associated Press, Google, Google News

AFP and Google last week settled their long-running copyright squabble on Friday when they signed a licensing agreement that will allow the French news agency’s material to appear on Google News.

AFP dropped its 2005 US lawsuit over Google’s unauthorised use of its content as part of the deal that a Google spokesman said will “dramatically improve the way users experience newswire content on the Internet” and will “ help highlight original journalism, giving credit to the newswire journalists who worked hard to break the news.”

The AFP deal is the latest hint that Google is adopting a different approach to the newswires than it is with “retail” news publishers.

Last summer, Google also signed another licensing agreement with the Associated Press. No further details of that deal were released, although that deal was said at the time to be a for a yet-unreleased new service from Google, rather than for Google News.

Google clearly understands that the major news agencies have carved out a uniquely important role online. Thanks to their prominent place on the web portals, the wire services are cementing their hold on online news, particular international news. Despite the multitude of “retail” news sites online, they rely on just two “wholesalers” — AP and Reuters — for most of their content, a study published last year by Chris Paterson of Leeds University illustrated (PDF).

This seems to make sense in many ways. One of the great weaknesses of Google News has been that many copies of agency reports often appear in its searches because dozens of newspapers have whisked copy straight from the wire to their web sites. Why should a reader have to trawl through dozens of copies of the same story? And why should one local paper get all the traffic from a report filed by an AP or AFP correspondent?

Everyone, it seems, can be happy. The wires, the users, the aggregators.

Well, almost everyone. Notice anyone missing from this party?

Tailoring journalism for Google users

Posted by Martin Stabe on 10 April 2006 at 12:24
Tags: Associated Press, BBC, Google, Journalism, Online, United States, Yahoo

Subeditors are increasingly tailoring headlines to attract visitors from search engines to their web sites, the New York Times reported yesterday.
Because search engines deliver a huge amount of traffic — and thus advertising reveune — to their web sites, news organisations are experimenting with search engine optimisation, or SEO.

The result is that heads online are often terse, literal versions of the headlines that appear on the printed page. Forget about puns or witty allusions to high or pop culture: Attracting the bots that feed content to search engines places a premium on using key words and basic facts explaining what the story is about. And brevity: The Associated Press now limits its headlines to 40 characters.

“There are no algorithms for wit, irony, humor or stylish writing,” notes Steve Lohr in the New York Times story.

This is not just an American phenomenon. Lohr quotes BBC News Online’s Nic Newman to illustrate how the Beeb’s web site uses two seperate headlines — one to attract search engines and one to be more appealing to human readers.
But pandering to Google could go far beyond just headlines, Lohr’s report says:

Journalists, [search experts] say, would be wise to do a little keyword research to determine the two or three most-searched words that relate to their subject — and then include them in the first few sentences. “That’s not something they teach in journalism schools,” said Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch, an online newsletter. “But in the future, they should.”

Before journalists begin wringing their hands about the technologically-determined death of style, the New York Times story makes an important point: Many of the current conventions of news writing originate with the cost of transmitting stories by telegraph.

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Bush holding private chats with Washington reporters

Posted by Jeffrey Blyth on 29 March 2006 at 12:12
Tags: Associated Press, Journalism, United States

They are hardly “fireside chats”. The informal, off-the-record meetings that President Bush has started having with members of the White House Press corps are more like fence-mending.

The meetings, usually in the president’s private quarters or his office, were initiated when Bush’s relations with Washington journalists appeared to have hit a new low.

Although not absolutely new — President Clinton had similar meetings at the time of the Monica Lewinsky scandal — it’s the first time President Bush has done so since he took office.

Journalists who accepted the invitation were asked not to write about the meetings – or what was discussed. Most have limited their comments to saying Bush was “pleasant, thoughtful and frank”.

Not all newspapers accepted the invitation. At least one, the New York Times, said it didn’t see off-the record chats were any benefit to its readers.

“As a matter of policy and practice, we would prefer when possible to conduct on-the-record interviews with public officials,” Philip Taubman, the paper’s Washington bureau chief, said in a statement.

News organizations that have so far accepted the invitations have included The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, The Los Angeles Times and Associated Press.

The newsmen were all served iced tea and soft drinks. No liquor. The meetings lasted about an hour. One newsman, quoted by Editor & Publisher, said it was “a little surreal“.

NY Times joins the share table cull

Posted by Jeffrey Blyth on 14 March 2006 at 14:40
Tags: Associated Press, Journalism, United States

Thee New York Times is joining papers that are cutting back on their stock market pages. Starting 1 April, the paper will drop its Monday-to-Friday listing of share prices - and reduce the number of stocks listed from several thousand to a few hundred.

Instead the prices will be available on a new web site. The cutback is expected to save the paper at least $10 million a year in newsprint and editorial costs.

The Los Angeles Times is making similar cuts to the share price listings beginning today and other papers in the US that have eliminated stock listings lately include the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, the Denver Post and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Others now expected to follow the New York Times.

The trend is expected to mostly hurt the Associated Press, which for years has provided America’s 900 or more papers with its daily stock tables.

Cutting the stock price agate has been a widely-discussed option in American newspapers for some time. Those in favour of cutting share price tables note that they are of interest primarily to a small number of older, affluent readers, and they can be displayed in a much more detailed and timely manner online.