The Washington Post's Paul Farhi asserts in the American Journalism Review that newspapers were harmed irrevocably by the Associated Press' decision to sell its content to such portals as AOL and Yahoo (then, presumably, to the newspapers' own sites).

He suggests that, if the genie were kept in the bottle and only the AP's family had access to the content, newspaper sites would not have found themselves competing against other information providers in the digital space so severely and rapidly. It would have bought time.

He dismisses the notion that Reuters or Agence France Presse would have been adequate substitutes.

Jeff Jarvis took him up on this argument and, while getting more than a little personal, suggested that it's AP's reluctance to link back to the original content that is most hurting the papers that own it.

In the digital age the media services of greatest use will be the ones with deep vaults of video. Which is why CNN's new offering of a full wire service ought to be taken seriously by Associated Press.
CNN.com is a well-written site, so extending that effort into a supply of breaking news is clearly viable. Other challenges are a little tougher ---  for instance, how to supply newsrooms with contextual and analytical material.
What CNN lacks in bsic text it can secure in part through its vast international bureaus and partly through several vertical relationships in its parent company's print stable. That stable of sources might be the key to the deal and to the attractiveness of taking CNN Wire over other services.
Even though AP and Reuters have successfully moved into video in the last decade, CNN's roster is pretty much unmatched worldwide. Its commentators are name brands (if syndicated on their own, something CNN will need to repatriate to achieve its best success). But overall, AP has to be taking notice in a hurry.

The planned rate structure for the Associated Press was suspended Thursday. A board meeting has directed a full review of membership policies. And its members will be given full access to AP's feed without additional fees that had been scheduled to take effect in 2009 (forgoing about $7 million in revenue in the process). Cuts are promised of about $9 million, in addition to the $21 million previously announced, and the review will examine a wide range of issues.
In recent weeks some 100 papers, including those in the Tribune chain (the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, among them), had served up two-year departure notices because of the two-tiered rate structure (breaking news in basic, enterprise news in a separate tier) and their ongoing cost pressures.
The decisions Thursday are good news for organizations looking to keep costs controlled as their revenues decline in the U.S. Without those changes, departure from AP was likely for several significant companies, which would have in turn weakened the newsgathering capabilities of the venerable wire service.
The board meeting clearly attempts to mollify the immediate cost challenges and review policies in time to keep the cooperative intact during the notice period.

The mandatory two-year notice of departure served up last week by the Tribune Company on Associated Press was the strongest shot yet across the bow of the wire service. Other organizations have done the same to the venerable AP in recent months, while some are likely contemplating the same in order to deal with their costs, the service itself and their participation in it as content providers who need to find new markets on their own.
AP is introducing a new rate structure that changes the package of material it will supply as part of a basic service. It's a complicated formula, but in general it compels outlets to pay a premium for non-breaking news. The notices (also served up by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Bakersfield Californian, and others) send the signal of discord with the new packaging.
Now, two years is a long time in this business, and there is no shortage of ideas on how AP might refashion itself to keep Tribune (which has such titles as the Sun-Sentinel and Sentinel in Florida, the Baltimore Sun) and others in the fold before they leave contractually. But it's a clear indication that news organizations feel emboldened to look for other suppliers to manage their non-local news costs.
In our case, we left The Canadian Press as a newspaper chain in mid-2007 and strengthened our own Canwest News Service. We contracted to such firms as Reuters, Agence France Presse, Press Association and others to supplement existing suppliers like The Daily Telegraph, Bloomberg and others for non-local content.
The move kept more funds within our company, permitted us to hire a new generation of journalist to help us drive change, gave us a tighter-knit relationship with a domestic service, and also meant we were no longer sharing our journalism with our competitors through a cooperative. It's hard to imagine, one year or so into the experience, how the service could have done any better.
Having worked at CP for 14 years (and run its competitor for about a year), I know how valuable news agencies have been. But in a challenging age of expense management in newsrooms, those agencies have to be nimble, niche-like when it matters, and on the same page about how content is shared. These days they have competitors across any category and there are other places to shop.
AP is a giant, so it can withstand the departure of any single organization without wilting. But if its rates are an issue, and its philosophy of what constitutes basic service and premium services even more of an issue, it is bound to have more notices arriving in the mail.

Today the Associated Press announced that some 500 newsrooms are using its Member Marketplace tool to publish to the Web. In having a look at it online at ReadWriteWeb, I'd agree it looks like an RSS feed that helps a newsroom editor understand what's been aggregated (in this instance, AP content) instead of using a batch of tools to compile and publish.
It's a significant step and I suspect other newsrooms and other tools are en route.

Business Week weighs in with a take on the flap between The Associated Press and the blogosphere with a clearly argued take on how big media might soon expect a chunk of small media if the little guys use the big guys' material.
The presence of software like Attributor (familiar to some of us in newsrooms) makes it rather simple to find out who is squeezing the grape once more on content generated elsewhere.
Is it only a matter of time before transactions occur for the use of content?

Since its earlier warning to Drudge Retort, and since the pushback from the blogging community, little has been heard from The Associated Press about its demands that bloggers not crib its reports for their reports.
The closest anyone seems to be getting to an understanding of the situation in this media blackout is the New York Times, which has interviewed (and been refused interviews by) the interested parties in the dispute.
Essentially it appears The AP wants to protect the headline and first paragraph of its reports (these also being significant traffic drivers because Google and other search engines tend to crawl the headlines and the first words more aggressively). The battle is, it seems, not just about fair use, but about the traffic those words can drive in search.
But it's also clear (in The AP's non-comment) that there is much more to come in this dispute. And, as goes The AP, so could go many other media.