Support journalism at its source

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A commenter on Matthew’s blog gives him a real-life example: the AP picked up a unique story from the Nashua, NH, Telegraph and that’s what Google displayed — along with other AP clients’ versions — above the original story from the paper. Now I know that the AP has been sensitive to this in many cases; they’re not out to hurt their own members and clients.

Nonetheless, the Google deal does rob traffic, thus revenue, from the paper that invested in journalism. And that will not help sustain journalism.

There’s a piece here missing. The newspaper made the story available for syndication — they basically sold it to AP (and got paid for it being syndicated out and used; that syndication then also gave the story wider visibility, and one wonders if it’d been noticed at all if AP hadn’t syndicated it. But that’s not my point here.

Suppose I write a science fiction story, and publish it on my web site. It gets some readers, and one of them publishes Really Nifty Science Fiction Magazine. She buys it and publishes it on the Really Nifty Science Fiction Magazine site.

Now, should I complain that the people reading the story are doing it on her site instead of mine? That is, to me, the core of this question: if the newspaper wanted to capture all of the traffic itself, it shouldn’t have syndicated the story off to AP. It has that option. Once they do sell the rights off to syndication, they’re getting paid for the syndication, but they want the direct traffic, too?

Maybe I’m missing something (now that’d be a first), but this sounds like they want the syndication money AND all of the direct traffic, but isn’t selling the syndication rights really licensing this out to AP so it becomes the effective rights owner here? On the assumption, of course, that your share of what AP earns syndicating it to a larger audience is more than you’d get by keeping it yourself. If it’s not, stop syndicating!

This is one of those great little wrinkles that happens with things you can sell while still owning. But I think in this case, AP and Google are doing the right thing. License something into a syndicating stream that is doing the redistribution, and that’s the primary source now that should be referenced, because they paid for the right to do that as part of the syndication agreement.

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  • Damon Kiesow

    I think you are misunderstanding the business relationships here. AP does not pay newspapers to syndicate their content. Newspapers are members of the AP cooperative – and pay AP to share and gain access to the content of the organization.
    AP is free to sell content – but they do not necessarily need to structure their partnerships with companies like Google in a way which potentially harms their own membership.
    This is not really a debate about syndication and publishing rights – but about trying to use technology to support rather than diminish local journalism efforts.