By now you’ve probably heard that the AP recently announced their intention to strictly regulate the amount of text that can be quoted from AP stories in blog posts.
The reaction from the blogosphere is, as you’d expect, vicious. Mike Arrington at TechCrunch is calling for a boycott of all AP stories, and likens the AP to the RIAA:
So even thought they say they are making these new guidelines in the spirit of cooperation, it’s clear that, like the RIAA and MPAA, they are trying to claw their way to a set of property rights that don’t exist today and that they are not legally entitled to. And like the RIAA and MPAA, this is done to protect a dying business model – paid content.
And Scott Karp at Publishing 2 has put out a call to local news outlets to seize the opportunity to co-opt the linking, quoting, and high-profile discussion that has been centered around AP work.
I understand the perspective of the AP. It’s easier than ever to take any amount of their stories (which they’ve invested a lot of money in creating) and redistribute enough of those stories that the reader might never have to click back to the AP site or buy a newspaper that paid to license the content. They’re worried that rampant citation will cut into their revenue—and it probably will.
But Arrington and Karp are right that the value going forward is in making sure the online conversations and links happen around your content.
The service that the AP provides is largely irrelevant. The AP exists as an efficient way to get remote news stories to local papers; this is a distribution solution. The value that the AP provides is in getting basic, commodity-level information from point a to points b, c, and d with relative efficiency.
However, the internet itself is now the most efficient distribution system. And it’s free. So suddenly the ability to get basic news halfway around the world isn’t really worth paying for anymore.
Given that the information is going to be out there anyway (I didn’t see or look up a single AP story about this topic), the best thing you can do is be high profile in the conversation. Get your coverage in as many places as possible, since the distribution is so cheap it might as well be free, and find ways to monetize it with ads or by adding premium services.
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The AP is starting down a dangerous path. It would do well to reconsider.
Eat Sleep Publish is a Seattle-based blog that explores the difficulties and opportunities currently facing the publishing industry. 
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