Update:<\/b><\/p>\n
Associated Press spokesman Paul Colford emailed me about this post, and said that “only a tiny fraction” of the content that the newswire shares with aggregators such as Google and Yahoo comes from its member papers. Here is his comment in full:<\/p>\n
“AP\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s state wires, which include member content, are not licensed to Google and other online aggregators. <\/p>\n
As a result, only a tiny fraction of the national and international stories sold by AP to aggregators originated with members of the cooperative \u00e2\u20ac\u201c typically scoops credited to the members. <\/p>\n
Except for this tiny fraction, the stories sold to Google and others are original AP reports by agency staffers.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Colford also said that the Nashua Telegraph yearbook story described in the post below moved on the AP wire with a tagline that gave credit to the newspaper (although I didn’t see any such credit on the Google News version).<\/p>\n
Original post:<\/b><\/p>\n
I got a comment<\/a> on one of my posts today from Damon Kiesow, the managing editor of the Nashua Telegraph, and I thought it was worth highlighting here because he talks about a real-world example of what the new Google “hosted news” deal with Associated Press is like for newspapers such as his. <\/p>\n
According to Damon, his paper wrote an offbeat story about a girl and her problems getting a picture into her high-school yearbook, and Associated Press picked it up — and now is ranked as the top source. Here’s his comment: <\/p>\n
Our first experience with<\/a> the new AP\/Google partnership:<\/p>\n
The yearbook story was an offbeat piece that was picked up by the national wire. So, instead of Google giving our version (NashuaTelegraph.com) top prominence – the AP\/Google page gets the traffic.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
As Damon points out, even the other newspapers that picked up the wire story — such as Boston.com — are given preferential treatment in Google News, and the original Nashua Telegraph story comes up at the bottom of the search results. But there’s a silver lining, says Damon:<\/p>\n
“Despite our angst at this, we have the last laugh as Fark.com ended up pointing at our version, driving 40 – 50k pageviews to that one story this morning.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Welcome to the ever-changing world of Google-driven news. Steve Yelvington has some worthwhile perspective on the Google AP deal here<\/a>.<\/p>\n