After hackers broke into Sarah Palin’s personal email account, the US Secret Service contacted Associated Press and asked for copies of the leaked e-mails, which circulated widely on the internet. The news agency did not comply.
The Associated Press (AP) is to give its newspaper partners access to reports on digital trends in the industry, in an arrangement with research firm Outsell Inc.
A release from the AP said the free service will help newspapers to understand online developments, such as web traffic measurement and online advertising issues.
Reports will be sent out quarterly and are free to AP member papers as part of the agency’s new Innovation Toolkit service.
In recent weeks a host of US newspapers have served notice on their membership with the AP, as the Editors Weblog reports, most responding to recent changes in pricing by the agency.
Some papers have grouped together to bypass AP content, while according to BuzzMachine.com, New Jersey’s Star-Ledger published an entirely AP-free edition yesterday.
A comment from Paul Colford, from the AP’s corporate communications department, on the BuzzMachine post said:
“We understand that The Star-Ledger and the media industry as a whole are facing difficult financial challenges and that in this environment many newspapers are experimenting with news priorities and with their presentation of news. The Associated Press has been working with all members of the cooperative, including The Star-Ledger, to determine their needs and to ensure that the AP news report retains its value to them and their readers. Member Choice, the content and pricing initiative rolled out this summer, was in fact developed as a response to member requests for simpler content and pricing options.”
The Associated Press (AP) has launched a celebrity news service to expand its coverage of entertainment news.
Celebrity Extra, which includes video footage, is the result of a multi-million dollar investment by the agency, a press release from AP said.
New staff have been hired to work on the service and new video production technology has been bought for its Los Angeles, New York and London bureaux.
A photo version of the service will launch in September.
Ron Fournier, head of the Associated Press’ Washington bureau, is encouraging emotive language and first person writing from journalists.
Fournier describes the style as ‘accountability journalism’ and sees its liberating form as a way to reinvigorate news reporting.
The Wall Street Journal wrote this week that the 162-year-old Associated Press (AP) is ‘beginning to fracture’ as the newspaper business in the US breaks up.
The AP last week announced a new set of ‘wire’ tools and cash back options to sweeten newspaper clients that are becoming disenchanted with the fees it demands and its increasing focus providing news and information packages for web publishing and non-traditional customers like Google and Yahoo.
However, its members have already started to seek alternatives to the AP for syndicating their stories and picking up relevant content for their publications from other news providers.
Journalism.co.uk detailed in April how eight of the largest newspapers in the US state of Ohio had begun bypassing the AP and forged an alliance to share their top stories.
The Columbus Dispatch, The Toledo Blade, the Cincinnati Enquirer, The Akron Beacon Journal, The Plain Dealer are amongst newspapers making up the membership of the Ohio News Organization (with the unfortunate acronym, OHNO).
Rather than relying to the Associated Press to decide at the end of each news day whether or not to distribute their stories, the papers now post content to private website – accessible only to those eight newsrooms – from which partner organisations will be able to select pieces to use and publish while the stories are still hot.
But it seems that OHNO is not alone in taking this kind of stance against the AP. According to the WSJ piece, Five Montana newspapers owned by the newspaper concern Lee Enterprises have also begun sharing content. In addition, editors in Texas, Pennsylvania and Indiana have inquired about how the Ohio cooperative works.
An online petition has been set-up urging bloggers to boycott the Associated Press (AP), after the agency filed takedown notices against Drudge Retort for use of its content on the site.
The campaign run by UnAssociatedPress has gained 75 signatures since it was set-up on Saturday and encourages bloggers to make use of other agency’s material.
Since issuing the takedown notices to the Drudge Retort, AP vice president Jim Kennedy has said the agency’s tactics have been heavy-handed and a more thoughtful approach would be considered going forward.
According to the New York Times, the agency is considering a set of guidelines for bloggers on how to use their content.
In a statement he stressed the importance of bloggers in ‘the news conversation of the day’, but said the agency is concerned by wholesale reproduction of its content, which goes beyond reference.
Kalle Jungkvist chaired the digital round table of the World Newspaper Congress looking at growing multimedia audience and revenues. Journalism.co.uk talked to him after the session about the success of his newspapers web TV operation.
In your opening you said that Aftonbladet was a video rich site and that you are a rival to Swedish TV broadcasters, could you explain how?
In a single week we have about one million visitors just to the video service. Even that is bigger than the whole of the audience to the biggest commercial TV site TV4. We are the biggest on web TV.
Swedish public service television focuses on longer programmes for web TV but they don’t have the same reach.
Is yours just news programming?
We work with feeds from AP and Reuters, the same feed really that TV companies have for their news programmes. We use part of that, clip it down and re-edit it and so on.
The other part is that we have a lot of user videos, so when there is a big explosion or a bank is robbed, for example, it takes just two minutes to get videos from the users.
So we do a lot of campaigning for the readers to send those to us and not to the TV stations.
The third part is that we have team of our own, both programming and editing, and also reporters going out on big stories.
And they put packages together?
We don’t make news programmes, we use news clips. From 30 seconds to three minutes. We use small format programmes for the web, five minutes or so, that are based on fashion with our fashion reporter for example and they are starting to get very high numbers.
For the European Football Championships we have also started an 18 minute programme with our football experts.
Just a year ago it was just 30 seconds to a minute clips that were popular, now there is a whole menu that is increasing fast.
What do you put that success down to?
We stared in 1997 and have had a small video web team all the way through. But we really launched web video services in a big way two years ago.
One very important point is that TV company websites just take clips from their ordinary news service… we noticed that, for a video clip that we produce together with written text, when you integrate it into a news story the numbers go up.
We try to have moving pictures with big news stories as fast as possible and we are much faster than the TV guys.
As the clips get longer has that changed when viewers watch them?
In the afternoon people look at shorter clips then in the evening we have a prime time at eight. The same as TV. People are looking at more and watching longer formats here, using us in a different way. They are at home, they are more relaxed and we are really taking people from the traditional broadcast TV to us.
We are not stealing a big audience yet but we haven’t had this peak at eight o’clock before… a lot of young people don’t look at linear TV anymore.
The Associated Press wants to grab itself a prime piece of technological real estate, it announced last week that it wants an AP button on the iPhone start-up page for quick access to news.
“There was a button for stocks, there was a button for weather, but there was no button for news,” says Jeffrey Litvack, director of global product development with the AP.
According to Forbes, the AP wants to be the organisation to run any ‘news’ button.
The AP launched its Mobile News Network last week.
Litvack says it can distribute stories from AP reporters and over 100 papers in a single service. He’s hoping its perfect for the iPhone and that Apple is listening.
I don’t mean to sound over emotional – it’ll just be the hormones acting on my smaller female brain – but I’ve got a problem with a report yesterday from the Associated Press about Charme Chacon, the Spanish defense minister.
The ministry has ordered its staff to stop browsing entertainment and sport websites during working hours. Says the report:
Spain’s Defense Ministry, run by a woman for the first time, has ordered its staff to stop browsing sports and entertainment Web sites while on duty, an official said Thursday.
A ministry official said the order was distributed this week, but did not come directly from the new minister, Carme Chacon, who took over last week as Spain’s first female defense minister. She is 37 years old and seven months pregnant.
What relevance do these points (in bold) have to the story? The order didn’t even come directly from Chacon, as the report states, so why let the copy imply that her gender and her pregnancy are somehow related to the situation?
Just in case there’s any confusion over this blog post – I am 24 years old and not pregnant.
The Associated Press (AP) is to launch a news and picture service for mobiles, as part of plans to help struggling newspapers.
The Mobile News Network, which is expected to start in the summer, will carry local news stories and images from participating newspapers and national news supplied by the AP.
Local advertising on the service will be sold by the newspapers in addition to national advertising from networks with an equal revenue share between news providers and ad sellers, a release from the AP said.
It is currently being tested by several newspaper companies including Hearst Corp. and McLatchy Co. and a similar product for video content is also being developed.
The agency also announced a reduction in fees in 2009, as part of widespread changes within the organisation’s price structure.
The AP had previously announced expected savings of £7 million if members implemented a digital tagging programme for news stories for search purposes.
The effect of a new pricing mechanism – in which breaking news content becomes the core product with extras added at a premium rate – is also likely to have an effect next year, with potential savings of $14 million for AP newspaper members.
In addition to the advertising revenue share plan on its mobile service, AP said it will also end fees for its graphics-based news service Money & Markets and provide unlimited access to archives for photo subscribers next year.