Associated Press Articles

This week in the Web publishing industry has been a little bit of everything: from blogs to online content, from social media to online visitors.

We have also learned that 95 of the top 100 newspapers have blogs. As far as the numbers go, it was a great week to be an online publisher.

Can a newspaper exist without publishing syndicated news content?

Early this month, The Star-Ledger of Newark, New Jersey, put this question to the test with a one-day boycott of The Associated Press news. The print issue relied primarily on stories by staff members, as well as Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, McClatchy-Tribune News Service and several smaller Advance Publication papers in New Jersey.

After the one-day experiment, The Star-Ledger was back to publishing AP news. While the boycott may have been inspired by a need to prove independence from the world’s largest news-gathering source, it also may have been fueled by the rate increase the AP is implementing in January 2009.

It’s over. The AP vs. Blogger debacle has been resolved. Sort of.

After having engaged in a “constructive exchange of views this week with a number of interested parties in the blogging community about the relationship between news providers and bloggers” the AP says “resolution of this matter illustrates that the interests of bloggers can be served while still respecting the intellectual property rights of news providers.”

You know it was too good for us to just leave well enough alone. After all, who doesn’t like a good fight? So that’s why we’re following the AP vs Bloggers story closely.

Recent reports suggest that the Associated Press has scheduled a meeting for this morning with the Media Bloggers Association. In hopes of discussing appropriate guidelines for quoting AP stories, the phrase “fair use” is bound to make a few appearances, as well as lots of analytics, indicating, perhaps, the large amounts of traffic that the AP gets from humble little blogs.