Tag Archives: Associated Press

What would Jeff do?

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In case you hap­pen to be a journ­al­ist and Jeff Jar­vis still has you think­ing that news­pa­per prob­lems are your fault, take a look at the New York Times from July, 1980 (and if you like catchy head­lines, they don’t come much catch­ier than this):

First U.S. Exper­i­ments in Elec­tronic News­pa­pers Begin in Two Com­munit­ies; 13 News­pa­pers to Be Added The Need for News­pa­pers A Com­mu­nic­a­tions Devel­op­ment Tele­phone, Cable and Air­waves A Warn­ing on Reg­u­la­tion [pay access]. Con­tinue read­ing →

Arguing against Nick Davies

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Flat Earth News by Nick DaviesBritish writer Nick Dav­ies is an inspir­a­tion to a lot of young journ­al­ists, and rightly so (you can read more of his writ­ing on social issues here). But now he has moved from cov­er­ing drugs and crim­inal justice to report on journ­al­ism. And in doing so, he com­mis­sioned some research to back up his cri­ti­cisms and ana­lysis. Con­tinue read­ing →

Reporting from Zimbabwe: Al Jaz vs. AP

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Mean­while, over at the Asso­ci­ated Press:

The gov­ern­ment com­mand­eered buses and state rail­road cars to carry Pres­id­ent Robert Mugabe’s sup­port­ers from across the coun­try for a march and rally near Har­are Friday.

The rally was a show of strength for Mugabe before a party meet­ing next month at which his con­tin­ued lead­er­ship was likely to be debated, and before pres­id­en­tial elec­tions next year in which he was expec­ted to run.

“The people will speak. Out­siders must keep their hands off,” Mugabe said to cheers from supporters.

He also ridiculed Bri­tain, the former colo­nial power, for “dis­cuss­ing us every week in their stu­pid parliament.”

An estim­ated 40,000 sup­port­ers marched from down­town Har­are to a one-time sports field in the nearby town­ship of High­field, where they were joined by thou­sands more rural sup­port­ers car­ry­ing umbrel­las against sea­sonal rains.

The McCann coverage, my two cents

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Demon­strat­ing, per­haps, my MBO (Mas­ter of the Bleed­ing Obvi­ous*) skills, here are my recent con­tri­bu­tions to cov­er­age of the ongo­ing Madeleine McCann saga. From the Asso­ci­ated Press:

And play­ing com­ment­ator tag in Time with Charlie Beck­ett:

For earlier posts — from May — see here and here.

*Basil Fawlty: Next con­test­ant, Mrs. Sybil Fawlty from Torquay. Spe­cial­ist sub­ject — the bleed­ing obvi­ous.

Google News — publisher!

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Here is Josh Cohen’s announce­ment about Google News:

Today we’re launch­ing a new fea­ture on Google News that will help you quickly and eas­ily find ori­ginal stor­ies from news pub­lish­ers — includ­ing stor­ies from some of the top news agen­cies in the world, such as the Asso­ci­ated Press, Agence France-Presse, UK Press Asso­ci­ation and the Cana­dian Press — and go dir­ectly to the ori­ginal source to read more.

Our goal has always been to offer users as many dif­fer­ent per­spect­ives on a story from as many dif­fer­ent sources as pos­sible, which is why we include thou­sands of sources from around the world in Google News. How­ever, if many of those stor­ies are actu­ally the exact same art­icle, it can end up bury­ing those dif­fer­ent per­spect­ives. Enter “duplic­ate detec­tion.” Duplic­ate detec­tion means we’ll be able to dis­play a bet­ter vari­ety of sources with less duplic­a­tion. Instead of 20 “dif­fer­ent” art­icles (which actu­ally used the exact same con­tent), we’ll show the defin­it­ive ori­ginal copy and give credit to the ori­ginal journ­al­ist. (We launched a sim­ilar fea­ture in Sort-by-Date and got great feed­back about it.) Of course, if you want to see all the duplic­ates on other pub­lisher web­sites with addi­tional ana­lysis and con­text, they’re only a click away.

By remov­ing duplic­ate art­icles from our res­ults, we’ll be able to sur­face even more stor­ies and view­points from journ­al­ists and pub­lish­ers from around the world. This change will provide more room on Google News for pub­lish­ers’ most highly val­ued con­tent: ori­ginal con­tent. Pre­vi­ously, some of this con­tent could be harder to find on Google News, and as a res­ult of this change, you’ll have easier access to more of this con­tent, and pub­lish­ers will likely receive more traffic to their ori­ginal content.

Because the Asso­ci­ated Press, Agence France-Presse, UK Press Asso­ci­ation and the Cana­dian Press don’t have a con­sumer web­site where they pub­lish their con­tent, they have not been able to bene­fit from the traffic that Google News drives to other pub­lish­ers. As a res­ult, we’re host­ing it on Google News.

Duplic­ate detec­tion isn’t just for our news agency part­ners — it also enables you to find the ori­ginal copy of art­icles from pub­lish­ers and news agen­cies that have their own des­tin­a­tion site. For these pub­lish­ers, we’ll con­tinue to show just a snip­pet of the story and a link, so you can read the full story on their site.

Inter­est­ing. These agen­cies don’t have con­sumer sites, eh? AP con­tent seems to prop up Yahoo! News. And they are agen­cies, their whole busi­ness pro­pos­i­tion is mak­ing money from selling on to people who then edit/re-write/sell on their stuff. So another change in the rules of the game.