It was about five years ago I stopped reading local newspapers because all they had was wire copy and some pretty lame local reporting I could get from the Internet, or from talking to friends.
This set of headlines from IWantMedia (the email version) really sums up what’s going on now:
sounds like it could be a miserable success
;D nmw
Why wouldn’t the AP just start their own news site? Their content is what holds value and once you sell it to a company like Google, doesn’t that kill it for resale?
@John
Because the AP doesn’t want to compete with the newspapers. (It’s a cooperative owned by its 1500 newspaper members.) Instead they sell the feed to other companies – AOL, Yahoo, Google – who compete with the newspapers.
AP actually does run its own site that hosts branded versions of AP content.
For example, here’s a story in the San Antonino skin:
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/S/STEVE_FOSSETT?SITE=TXSAE&SECTION=US&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
Here is the same story in the Lansing skin:
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/S/STEVE_FOSSETT?SITE=MILAN&SECTION=US&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
(just change the variable after site)
The hosted version of AP is usually used by smaller papers who don’t want to take the feed in. Larger papers typically ingest the feed and republish using their own CMS.
Reuters (which relies to a much lesser extent on newspapers for $), took the other path and hosts their own content in a Reuters branded site.