The Baltimore Sun's Jay Hancock, in an April 8, 2007 column, asks a question that newspaper publishers seem assiduously to avoid. "Why," he asks "do newspapers pay the Associated Press to distribute their expensive, hard-won stories to radio, TV, Yahoo and other enemies of newspapers?"
If you are reading this, you know that the Associated Press (we used to sarcastically call it the Amalgamated Plumbers in my days as an editor at the Charlotte Observer) is owned by its newspaper members. Its board of directors is a Who's Who of the newspaper business, counting among its members Gary Pruitt of McClatchy, Mary Junck of Lee, George Irish of Hearst, and Bo Jones of the Washington Post, to name just a few.
While it has its own reporting staff, the biggest portion of news that goes out daily over the AP "wire" (a wonderfully anachronistic term) comes from its members. Those members contribute news to AP, and they pay AP for access to content from AP reporters and other newspapers.
That all makes sense. But why do its newspaper members permit AP to sell newspaper content to the likes of Yahoo? Yahoo's business model, in part, involves attracting inquisitive people who might otherwise buy newspapers to its website to search for the news they would have found in the newspapers they no longer are buying. Why buy the cow, as my grandmother used to say, if you can get the milk for free?
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