Here’s my theory Danny.

I hope AP does find a way to charge Google for the content. With any luck, Google will make the AP identify their content (maybe via these new tags) and then just stop including it in Google News or Serps. Now the newspapers will get hit and hopefully over time stop relying on the AP so much and spend the money they pay the AP to hire more reporters to do local/national stories. Let the national news migrate to dedicated national publications and the others revert back to more local coverage with more local advertising and create more local jobs.

We have 3 large newspapers in South Florida, all competing for national coverage, If the Miami Herald, focused on only national and let the other two focus on only local, all three would be better off. The Herald would not have to spend so much of its resources covering local and the other two would not have to spend to cover national.

There is probably a huge hole in my plan. But it seems straight forward to me, not including all the politics that would ensue.

Here’s another example of newspapers NOT GETTING IT — I was reading my local paper, The Islander News, and found a story about Guillermo Canas’ plans to open a tennis academy in Key Biscayne, FL, and thought about searching for more information online. After clicking on some articles snippets from different tennis sites and trying to follow the full article from the Miami Herald, I kept getting a 404 error:

Unfortunately we are unable to locate the page you have requested. This could be due to content on our site having expired, a broken link, an outdated bookmark, or a mistyped address. Please use the navigation provided on this page, or click here to visit our home page.

Perfect. So much for all those quality-links to the full article. And yes, you can find the story in their archive, but they’re obviously not getting it. It’s not just Google love they’re rejecting — it’s lots of love (links) from blogs and forums and other online pages.

Maybe they’ll read your blog one day Danny, or perhaps attend SMX, or something… They surely don’t have an SEO.

You can’t pick up your 31 favourite most recent blog articles from the newsstand across from the coffee shop yet, but with the Kindle and Amazon syndicating blogs the day isn’t far away IMHO.

I’ve linked to the AP in the past, thanks for letting me know about the ‘30 Day Rule’ Danny.

Why the hell would they want to hide stories they let Google News distribute to a MUCH larger audience than individual bloggers?

AP – if you’d like 100% Free Access to redistribute any of my blog posts, it’s all yours baby. I like it when people visit my website.

Nonsense. Pure and simple.

Danny, your POV is awesome, but I am not understanding the AP argument. They want to be in a web world, but not have the web be part of their business model? Who does that? The purpose of being online is…shit, being ONLINE. You don’t want your content indexed by the SE’s? easy peasy, noindex, nofollow, end of story.

But how can they expect their customers, who I’m sure pay a hefty fee, not to use basic web distribution models, like duh, rss feeds, to benefit from having that content. That rss feed goes out to many places that will send traffic back to the originator, but some will leak away, that’s just a fact of life, and another fact of life is that Google SEARCHES THE WEB for content, and bingo, AP content out there like mad, and the AP is angry about that? Because if that’s the case, then the AP’s logic or argument or baby spit rant is way above my head.

The AP is indeed a web publisher. Do you not find AP stories all over the web

Seriously, I think you mean that they are not trying to be a primary publisher. That the AP traditionally puts its stories out through member publications.

Yes, and that’s a problem for them. That’s caused some members to leave stories up, while other members don’t pull them down when they’re supposed to. It gets some members angry with others who use AP stories to pull in traffic from Google that the other members want. That was part of the issue that was supposed to be resolved in the “new uses” provision of the AP-Google deal that was cut several years ago. Never happened.

Meanwhile, the AP itself plans to launch its own portal for AP content. It’s hard for me to go into more details because, as I’ve explained, the AP doesn’t seem to think it’s worth talking to me about their plans. It sounds like they’ll simply collect articles as they run in various member publications. That won’t solve many of the problems they claim to have.

Bottom line — if they aren’t putting out stories directly, then they need to organize some way for people to find the “originating” article from the AP, so links don’t break, those trying to do the right thing with linking can and member publications don’t fight like dogs over the traffic pickings. They don’t appear to be doing any of that.

Perhaps AP isn’t as much of a website publisher themselves compared to the consumers of their services, but they are still publishing to the web, and very much dependent on the web distribution model, no?