May 26, 2010
Publish2 News Exchange launches: Competition for AP’s market?
On May 24, Publish2 announced the launch of the Publish2 News Exchange, which “enables newspapers to create a comprehensive, customized newswire for print, combining content sharing networks with the highest quality free and paid news sources.” In a Publish2 blog post, founder Scott Karp openly positioned this move as an effort to “disrupt the Associated Press monopoly over content distribution to newspapers.”
What might this mean for news organizations and journalists?...
Playing nice with old technology is a key aspect of Publish2’s News Exchange Strategy. Karp writes that this service “connects natively to outdated newspaper print publishing systems. We support the standard formats used by the AP and the technologies that newspapers already use to move content between print and Web systems. Our self-serve permissioning system enables newspapers and other publishers to distribute content to whomever they choose on whatever terms they choose.”
If this technical integration actually performs well, that’s pretty important. Many news organizations face increasingly constrained options because they rely on entrenched, large, hard-to-update, print-focused content management systems. These systems are typically very picky about content formats. It often takes time and effort to integrate content produced by more modern CMSs into these systems—at least, if you want to run that content in print, rather than online only. (Ryan Sholin of Publish2 said that they support NITF and ANPA formats, and can import/export to print publishing systems via authenticated webfeeds or FTP.)
One of AP’s historical strengths has been that content from the AP wire is print ready. In fact, AP has been around so long that many newspaper CMSs were designed specifically around AP-style content.
“To disrupt the AP now, we have to support print,” writes Karp. “While print lasts, we want to make it more like the Web: more dynamic, a richer, better product. We want to make curating high quality content for print as easy as linking on the Web.”
The larger question is: Will enough print news organizations bite for Publish2 to sustain this business? That could be challenging.
AP isn’t simply a news publisher and wire service, but a cooperative owned by its contributing US newspapers, radio and television stations. AP member news organizations have a greater level of investment in and identification with AP than might be the case in a conventional vendor relationship. For instance, William Dean Singleton is chairman and CEO of Media News Group, which owns over 50 newspapers—and he’s also chairman of AP’s board of directors.
However, for the past few years many newspapers (especially smaller outlets) have been voicing their discontent with AP’s cost and service, and have been breaking ranks. (I wrote about this in 2008 for Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)
Spot.US is one of several news producers that created a Publish2 News Exchange newswire for the launch of this service. Spot.us founder David Cohn explains why he thinks a service like this could represent the “Craigslisting of the AP.”
“The vast majority of what Craigslist offers to people is free,” said Cohn. “That would be ludicrous to newspaper classifieds 20 years ago. But what Craigslist did was find the rock bottom. In doing that - they elbow out all competitors. Publish2.com has the chance to hit the rock bottom price range. That might sound ludicrous to the AP to drop prices and find the rock bottom—but that’s why there is so much room for competition.”
Bernardo Motta, assistant professor of communications at Bridgewater College (Bridgewater, VA), noted that Publish2 offers some advantages to freelance journalists. In a post to a private discussion list (quoted here with his permission), he said: “Publish2 works well for the disenfranchised journalists and freelancers. It also works well for very small journalistic organizations that can’t afford to pay AP’s service and even college papers.”
Motta explained how it works from the freelancer’s perspective: “It’s a place where you can exhibit your portfolio, manage your different publishing options (some people have four or five blogs, plus Twitter, Facebook, etc.) in one place. Then, you can use it to make contacts with organizations that might be willing to pay for your content. That’s definitely more work than just filing stories—but that is today’s reality for most freelance journalists.”
On the competition front, Motta speculates: “I don’t think Publish2 is really out to substitute AP, they are too different and directed to different publics.”
Publish2 is promoting the News Exchange as a source of “high-quality” content. On this point, Motta notes: “AP may have [specific journalistic] standards, but Publish2 leave the standards to the people who will be choosing to run the stories.”
VIDEO: Scott Karp’s presentation of the Publish2 News Exchange at the Disrupt 2010 conference:
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Tags: services, distribution, ap, syndication, wire services
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