Fifty US newspapers that had previously given notice of cancellation (two years warning is required) to the Associated Press have rescinded those notices, reports Editor&Publisher.

50 Papers Rescind Associated Press Cancellation Notices.

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The Chicago Tribune and Tribune Co.’s other US newspaper titles will run a week-long experiment starting from next Monday by using as little Associated Press (AP) content as possible.

The trial is part of review into costs and follows the Tribune’s warning to the agency last year that it might drop the service.

Full story at this link…

Last year a group of newspapers in Ohio forged an alliance (the Ohio News Organisation or OHNO) to share their top stories in a move against AP copy.

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A new ‘microformat’ for metadata in news stories is fast nearing a stage of ‘widespread adoption’. The ‘hNews’ system will attach information about the author of the story, where it was published and where it was written, to every news story.

Media Standards Trust director Martin Moore updates on the latest hNews developments today: AOL and TownNews should be coming on board soon, to join the Associated Press which signed up in July.

“Thousands of news articles marked up with with hNews, a microformat for news content funded by the Knight Foundation, will soon start populating the internet. Last week, hNews became an official draft microformat. Having been proposed as a new data format and then discussed within the microformats community, it is now in draft 0.1 at Microformats.org. This means it has reached a stage where the microformat community believes it is stable enough for widespread adoption.”

Full post at this link…

More to follow from Journalism.co.uk next week.

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US military leaders in Afghanistan have reportedly backed down on plans to ban news organisations from photographing or videoing US soldiers killed or injured in battle.

According to the Associated Press (AP), some confusion remains about what images can be captured by reporters embedded with the army in war zones.

The proposed ban came partly in response to the AP’s recent decision to publish images of a fatally wounded marine.

Full story at this link…

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Ah, Nieman Journalism Lab, how we love your full transcripts and audio.

Publishers must take back control of their content from search engines, aggregators and bloggers, which have become the ‘preferred customer destinations for breaking news’, the Associated Press (AP) president and chief executive Tom Curley told an industry summit in Beijing last week.

But as Nieman Journalism Lab reported on Friday, Curley was ‘far more revealing’ when he spoke without a prepared text on October 6 at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong.

NJL is kindly sharing the audio and transcript.

Full post at this link…

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Publishers must take back control of their content from search engines, aggregators and bloggers, which have become the ‘preferred customer destinations for breaking news’, the Associated Press’ (AP) Tom Curley has said at an industry summit in Beijing.

“We will no longer tolerate the disconnect between people who devote themselves – at great human and economic cost – to gathering news of public interest and those who profit from it without supporting it,” Curley said (though slightly strangely citing Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook as key examples of threats).

Speaking separately at the event, News Corp owner Rupert Murdoch said ‘the aggregators and plagiarists’ would soon have to pay the price for using publishers’ content for free.

If publishers and news organisations don’t regain control they will pay ‘the ultimate price’ and it will be ‘the kleptomaniacs who triumph’, he added.

Earlier this week the Associated Press (AP) said it is considering whether it could sell news items to online clients for a short, exclusive period.

The agency is also developing a new system for tracking its content online and monitoring copyright infringements.

Full story at this link…

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The Associated Press (AP) has explained its decision last week to publish an image of Lance Corporal Joshua M. Bernard, a US marine fatally wounded in combat in Afghanistan.

According to reports, the soldier’s family did not want the photo in question to be published.

The AP has also confirmed it received a letter from US defence secretary Robert Gates asking the agency not to publish it.

Now the agency has explained its decision – including the following from the AP’s director of photography, Santiago Lyon:

“AP journalists document world events every day. Afghanistan is no exception. We feel it is our journalistic duty to show the reality of the war there, however unpleasant and brutal that sometimes is.”

Full story at this link…

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The AFP is reporting that two Associated Press journalists have been seriously wounded in a bomb attack in southern Afghanistan.

The agency has identified the pair as photographer Emilio Morenatti, 40, and Andi Jatmiko, 44.

Full story at this link…

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A cost-saving measure of automatic translation is produces ’some confusing results’ for La Tribune, the Editors’ Weblog reports (via the AP).

“In a bid to increase its international audience, the French business newspaper La Tribune has begun using software to translate its website into English, German, Spanish and Italian. Unfortunately for the paper, the cost-saving measure of automatic translation produces some confusing results.

“A current headline on the English-language site reads: “The United States: confidence of the consumers in Bern, reduced trade deficit,” which appears to make a serious error in geography. What do American consumers have to do with the Swiss capital?”

Full story at this link…

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The Associated Press has signed a deal to distribute the work of of four non-profit journalism groups.

Work by the Center for Public Integrity, the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and ProPublica will be free for publication by the agency’s 1,500 newspaper members.

Full story at this link…

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