RSSAP, Reuters struggle to control the news flow in a changing marketplace
By Angela Gunn | Published October 1, 2008, 10:02 AM
The largest wellspring of news in America is rethinking how it gets its words out, and the future looks a lot like RSS. Meanwhile, one of its main competitors is suing a plug-in creator who brought social networking to "its" turf.
The wellspring in question is the Associated Press -- the colossal wire service that pumps news to over 1,700 newspapers and 5,000 TV and radio outlets. Years ago, that job was done by teletype, a clattering beast of a machine that emitted paper and ink, and around which newsrooms centered. If you've ever seen a movie where some cigar-chomping editor rips a story off a typewriter-looking object and starts snarling, you have seen a teletype. (Or, for Terry Gilliam fans, it's the machine into which the bug falls at the beginning of Brazil.)
Times change. For years, AP has delivered articles, photos, video, and other content to members via a searchable online service called AP Exchange, which keeps several weeks' worth of information available to those who learn to properly operate the somewhat cranky interface. Its function in the newsroom was essentially the same; members looked at the available stories, picked out the items they thought best suited their readership, and "ripped" those from the subscription-only site for formatting and further use.
But times change again, and -- struggling to retain members and keep up with the "Daily Me" news melange most Internet users cobble together -- AP now has another idea: the Marketplace, which lets publishers click on categories or specific stories to auto-populate a Web page with slickly formatted AP content.
The goal of Member Choice, according to the user manual, is to connect AP members to more locally relevant content -- territory vocally staked out in recent years by "citizen journalist" bloggers and ultra-localized Web sites, and shaky terrain for papers that have been forced to slash newsroom staffing to the bone. Member Choice can also fuel print versions of local papers, but online a Member Choice-driven page can update 24/7.
The Morning News in Springdale, Arkansas is an early adopter, and NWABikers.com shows off the tech in action -- a multi-column page similar to My Google or Netvibes (to name but two) but with a very newspaper "feel" to the interface. Behind the scenes, editors have constructed custom searches to root through the AP Exchange mothership for content; over time, as editors refine those searches, those pages will percolate along on their own. Editors at the Springdale paper praise the service for keeping local readers informed on a hot topic even when there's not enough locally generated content to keep the topic page going.
Meanwhile, Thomson Reuters (owner of the competitive wire service Reuters) is in court, suing George Washington University and an art-history professor there for building a free Firefox plug-in that does what its own EndNote bibliography-creation tool does.
The plug-in, Zotero, is mainly geared toward academic users, who use it to organize and share research sources and citations. EndNote also organizes citations, but lacks the blog-friendly aspect. When Thomson Reuters realized that Zotero can also convert files from Endnote's proprietary .ens format to the open-source .csl format, it summoned its attorneys.
Academic users -- the target market for both tools -- are nonplussed, especially since a single installation of EndNote can cost as much as $299. Henry Farrell, writing for the Crooked Timber blog, kicked off a discussion of the matter with a fairly representative opinion: "Regardless or not of whether it's legal, this is a b******t move on Thomson Reuters' part."
On Zotero's own forums and elsewhere online, some users of the free software were offering to pass the hat for the university's legal fees. A Zotero spokesperson said that an official statement on the situation is pending.
Hi Foxfyre! AP is, in large part, precisely the decentralized entity you describe -- it is, if you like, a ***very*** large news collective, with a board of directors and a lot of staff reporters, but a lot of other writers that are off doing their own thing. The problem is that the news media is grappling with the same forces that "have affected every other area of society" -- but I'm talking about cost-cutting measures that have made so much of the American media landscape homogeneous. The problem there is not that the wires are "control agents;" the problem is that so many news outlets now rely on the wires (rather than their own reportorial staff) as a cost-cutting measure that it *feels* like some centralized system. Your average newsroom is understaffed to a degree you'd never believe; if it weren't for wire copy, there'd barely be enough in the paper to justify whipping up a tub of ink.
(If you want a great example of how insane the cost-cutting has been, consider international news coverage -- foreign correspondents. Once upon a time, LOTS of papers that were not the NY Times or the Washington Post sent their own reporters to work in places like London and Moscow, getting coverage that was exclusive to each particular newspaper. These days, the people who run newspapers cheap out, use the same wire copy that most of the rest of the nation uses, and then they wonder why readership is down. Um, duh -- if I'm getting the same coverage from pretty much any other paper, why would I be loyal to one?)
Anyway. You're right that online availability, the presence of fresh voices in the blogosphere and in online publications, and (especially) Craigslist have put a lot of media behind the times to the tune of 15 years or so. My impression of Member Choice is that it's an attempt by AP to address some of that -- the reader cravings for the flavor you used to get from a smart, savvy newsroom that really understood what its specific readership wanted.
One of the examples I didn't use in the article sticks with me. The local paper in Charleston, WV, put together a Member Choice page covering Jennifer ("Alias") Garner. She's a hometown girl so there's tons of interest, but the Charleston Daily Mail isn't likely to have the resources to send a reporter and a photographer to cover her every move. But she's a celebrity, so you can bet there's AP content about her! The Daily Mail editors did up a search that grabbed AP's information and made a nice page plus slide show. Quite a hit with the readership apparently, and a nice example of the mainstream media (ugh, that phrase) using its reach and ubiquity to do something the blogosphere's not going to be able to do for... oh, a while.
Now, how does this compare to a well-done Google News setup or a well-tempered feedreader? Well, I know which I'm more likely to use on a daily basis, but then again if I'm after info on a specific topic and a Member Choice page hits the spot -- hey, like you said, it's the horizontality. But for now, this is to me an interesting attempt to provide the wire services' members some local flavor (and some better value for money, AP membership being not so cheap).
So that's AP. As for Reuters... um, you're on your own with that one, mmkay?
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|The notion that in an utterly distributed ubiquitous online worldwide environment, that one or two centralized control agents would face challenges is a story that is 15 years late.
Why should the news (if that is really what anyone really wants to call it!) be immune to the same horizontal decentralizing forces that have affected every other area of society due t the advent of ubiquitous online availablity?
In other words...where is the 'news' in this story? ;-)
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