Building a pointless wall

By Fester:

Ed Morrissey is banging the drum loudly and correctly on the problem with the Associated Press's decision to make reading and commenting on its content too risky for high intensity news consumers, news junkies and distributed opinion leaders (aka bloggers):

Let�s just call it the Fast Track to AP Irrelevance. Without a doubt, the new policy will have a chilling effect on blogs and aggregators who normally link to their content. Unfortunately for the AP, that won�t result in an increase of revenues, but in having the entire online world ignore the AP. The Times itself discovered this dynamic when it put its columnists behind the $50 dollar Firewall of Sanity. Not only did the world fail to beat down their door to regain access to Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, and Bob Herbert, they also discovered that their columnists became all but invisible in the rapidly-growing and influential New Media.

Besides, the AP doesn�t get to determine what �fair use� means; Congress does. It has been a long-accepted practice for commentators to use small excerpts from articles in order to both report the news and to comment on its delivery. This goes back decades, when reviewers excerpted novels and media critics excerpted each other to deliver critiques. Just because the AP doesn�t like copyright law doesn�t mean it doesn�t still applies to them. However, the threat of legal action and the cost to people working on small revenue streams will mean that their threats will mostly be effective.

The problem the AP faces is one of differentiation. It sells a product, basic information, that is generic and homogenous. There is very little unique or high value analysis, very little that makes what the AP produces significantly and meaningfully different than anything produced by some combination of Reuters, UPI, Agence France Press, BBC, New York Times, current blog and opinion aggregators such as BlogBurst and the best bloggers out there on any given subject. Their advantage is a national and international distribution network that is a wasting asset as more and more news is consumed online instead off the page.

Ed is right that the threat of legal action and its attendant costs will keep small bloggers with beer money revenue streams from tango-ing with the Associated Press. He is also right that this is a great way for the AP to be irrelevant unless the AP figures out a way to make basic news a high value and differentiated product. I don't think they can do that.