Associated Press (AP), the venerable news gathering agency, seems to be struggling with the realities of the digital publishing revolution. Here talks with Google’s news gathering source have broken down. The talks centered on a licensing agreement Google has with the Associated Press that allows them to host its content on Google properties like Google News. Google says there will be no new AP content hosted pending resolution of the disagreement.
 The net result is Google is no longer hosting new AP stories in their news search results. Read the full story at CNNMoney.com.
Associated Press has a problem. As a news content collector and distributor, they only profit from the sale of that content through deals struck with news and media sources. They don’t have a ‘homepage’ that can be monetized with ads etc. in ways similar to news reporting outlets. Those organizations directly benefit from traffic collected and redirected by Google searches. The Internet and digital publishing is starting to cut into AP’s territory. One can understand their dismay, since they’ve been around from the beginning when news was only available on paper, yah?
But AP has to let it go. That’s the past. The digital publishing world demands an adapt or die strategy. Let’s hope they figure it out and make a course change. We need the Associated Press, if not for their content as a primary source, then at least we need their skills as painstaking collectors and distributors of information.
Perhaps that’s what AP should do: Become a news or content substantiation or fact evaluation service. An Associate Press stamp of approval would go a long way in validating an Internet news provider, don’t you think?
