AP, Reuters struggle to control the news flow in a changing marketplace
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.