Wall Street Journal reports: the AP is hurting newspapers

A few weeks ago I explained how the AP is now competing with newspapers.

Apparently, other people agree. The Wall Street Journal has a story today about the widening rift between the AP and various newspapers, especially those in Ohio. Here’s the story that Ben Marrison, editor of the Columbus Dispatch had for the WSJ:

In the past, Mr. Marrison says, he could usually count on the AP to cover such a trial if he wanted to commit more reporters to a bigger story. When he was told the AP wouldn’t have a reporter there, he sent one of his own to Akron. Shortly after the story was posted on the Dispatch’s Web site, an AP staffer rewrote it for a broader audience and put the new version on the state wire. “So it was important enough for them to move, but not important enough for them to cover,” Mr. Marrison said. “What has happened is we’ve become the wire service for the wire service.”

There’s a lot I don’t know about the AP. But from the outside looking in, their role in the news space is definitely changing.

The AP used to be a great way to efficiently cover important stories for multiple papers at the same time. This is because newspapers have limited staff, and some stories really only need to be written once, even if people in Lexington, Seattle, San Angelo, and Orlando all need to know about the subject.

Thanks to the internet, that service is effectively irrelevant. If something happens in New Hampshire, there’s no reason that I can’t read the local story even if I am sitting anywhere else in the world (except possibly a plane, where I am currently sitting).

Now the AP is simply a content reseller, which is another service that is in danger of becoming effectively irrelevant.

Here’s the problem with reselling content on the internet: it’s only valuable once. The first time it shows up, search engines index it, it gets logged as original content, and if its good and people link to it, it bubbles up into the public consciousness.

The second time it shows up, search engines think “I’ve seen this before,” and file it away as derivative content. After all, why would someone want to see the same result twice in a search engine?

Oh sure, if you post content—any content—someone will find it on your site before they find it on another site, and you’ll get some traffic. But the more often a piece of content shows up, the more problematic it is (from a search standpoint) to host it.

If you were to draw a graph of content value over the number of times it’s been posted already, it would look like this: