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The AP Empire Strikes Back
In the AP-blogger battle, the news organization shows a lack of understanding.
June 20, 2008 — -- Now it's AP's turn to be a dumb media dinosaur.
I can't help thinking that history is going to look back at the last decade in utter disbelief at the way one company after another — retailers, entertainment corporations, but most of all media enterprises — not only misread the implications of the Internet age, but as time went on failed to learn from the mistakes of others.
It never ends; just when you think that old-line companies finally get it that the rules have changed and they have to change with them … one of them suddenly pops up and tries to reset the rules to circa 1985.
The general reaction is dismay, amusement and sometimes anger (don't those clowns understand?), but before everything there is astonishment. As marketing guru Tom Hayes describes it, "Just when you think the Thanksgiving dinner is going well, Grandpa suddenly wets himself."
So many sectors of society and business have now moved on to the Web 1.0, even Web 2.0, world, that when some leftover from the Industrial Age tries a trick out of the old playbook you can only marvel … then step back so you're not hit by shrapnel from the blow-back.
As you may have read, a few days ago the Associated Press, that venerable (162-year-old) wire service that provides news and feature stories to media outlets all over the world, suddenly decided to go on the warpath against the blogosphere. It chose an unlikely target — the Drudge Retort, a leftist news portal that (as its name suggests) was created in counterpoint to the much-larger and more famous Drudge Report.
Last week, AP wrote to the owner of the Retort, Rogers Cadenhead, demanding that it "expeditiously" take down five stories and one user comment — all of which contained extracts from AP stories — because they constituted violation of AP's copyrights.
Those extracts, Cadenhead confirmed later, amounted to just 33 to 79 words. Moreover, each offered a link to the original story, thus driving the traffic of interested readers to AP itself.
So, what's the problem? That's what everybody wanted to know. Everybody but AP. Apparently some bozo inside the operation had a flash of inspiration that the company could, you know, make money by charging those Internet guys for quoting from AP articles.
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