AP's New Line: We're Just Looking Out for the Folks

Is the Associated Press feeling a bit misunderstood? Earlier this week, the news cooperative launched an initiative to make sure AP and its member organizations get paid for online use and consumption of the content they generate.

The response was somewhat quizzical; many viewed AP as picking a losing legal fight against blogs and aggregators, which have a fair bit of legal wiggle room under the "fair use" provision of the copyright act. Others said AP's crusade was self-defeating, noting that Google and other sites drive a huge amount of traffic to content provider's sites.

Now AP is clarifying its intentions, somewhat, insisting that the initiative is less about money and fairness than about making sure the public is fully informed. In an FAQ, the cooperative emphasizes the need for consumers to be able to "find news from authoritative and original sources in the most flexible ways":

When consumers look for news today on search engines, they often get directed in a random fashion to a wide variety of news sources, blogs and other Web pages. Searches on breaking news topics such as floods, earthquakes and shootings don't dependably produce results from authoritative local news sources, and often not even to those media responsible for producing the news stories. AP will work with its member newspapers, broadcasters and other media to create a set of search-optimized pages that will guide users to the most timely, authoritative coverage related to their searches.

Of course, AP also wants to get paid. But the FAQ says the initiative "is not about" pushing a strict interpretation of fair use and then using as a bludgeon to whack bloggers and and aggregators who cross the line into piracy; rather, "it is about making it easier for consumer to access and engage with news content in more robust ways."