AP: Yeah, we'd better cite pajama-wearing bloggers, too

By Nate Anderson | Ars Technica | 09-06-2010

The Associated Press didn't need any help from a bunch of unshowered bloggers pecking away at their keyboards from the basement offices in which they play "reporter," thank you very much. Now it knows better.

At the AP's 2009 annual meeting, Chairman Dean Singleton reminded his audience (read the speech) that the AP and its members "are the source of most of the news content being created in the world today." The collective remains "the gold standard of newsgathering and reporting throughout the world." And with 62 journalists killed, beaten, or detained in 2008, journalism "is not a profession for the fainthearted, or those who work in their pajamas."

This final phrase was inaccurate—at Ars, for instance, we never break news while wearing anything less than an ascot and monocle—and surprisingly juvenile; one can feel the acid dripping from those words, even through a screen. The speech amounted to a near-total dismissal of bloggers as anything more than parasites in the news ecosystem. In the same talk, Singleton talked about how the AP "must be paid fully and fairly," then announced a new plan to pursue "misappropriation" of its content on the Internet.

I'd quote more from Singleton's speech, but the AP's automated excerpting system informs me that I've already rung up a charge of $17.50 for my quotes above. Another sentence or two and I'd bump up into the $25 bracket. Fair use certainly applies here, but the AP warns darkly that "there is no specific number of words or lines that may safely be taken without permission" and that I may "want to do an internet search of 'fair use checklist' and 'copyright myths.'" To be safe, I'd best pay up. (I took my chances with fair use instead, as the AP itself does every day.)

Don't rewrite us, either

Over the course of 2009, it became clear that the "misappropriation" that so bothered the AP wasn't just rank copyright infringement; it also included people who "rewrite" a bit too much AP news—even though copyright doesn't protect ideas and facts, just their specific expression.

At a Federal Trade Commission conference this year, the AP's Laura Malone expanded on this notion of "hot news," in which the AP has some control even over the facts found in its stories.

[Hot news] protects people. It protects the news organizations who are sending their reporters out at a cost, and that cost is not just dollars and cents, that cost is also lives, that there are people who are sitting in their homes at their computers, reading what the AP has reported, at a cost, and retyping it, sending it, and reselling it, so there's the free writing that happens. There are direct competitors—the Associated Press losing its customers because they were able to purchase it at a lower cost from the person who sat in his living room and retyped the stories and stripped the Associated Press' credit off it... We're gonna put fewer reporters out in the field. We're gonna have fewer people and fewer bureaus out there. We're gonna have fewer people to read those three Chilean reports, those three Chilean reports that were gotten by people who were there on the site doing original sourcing and doing original reporting. So, I don't think it's just a footnote, though I do put it in my copyright-infringement letters, as well. I rely very heavily on hot news misappropriation.

It doesn't take a "real reporter" to spot the bizarre logical contradiction in Malone's one example: her "real" English-language reporter gathered his initial news from other sources, who would presumably have the same right to go after the AP for "misappropriating" their work. The AP's "we're the center of the (news) universe" view of journalism has been undercut by reality for some time, but it has taken a while for that reality to percolate up the organizational ladder. A true, national "hot news" right would actually expose the AP and its members to all sorts of liability in a world where news is unearthed by a huge array of sources, then reported and built on by others.

As Duke professor James Boyle said at the same conference, "They are assuming that this new [hot news] right will only be wielded by them. Not so. Think of political activists who break a story—for example the young conservative filmmakers who produced devastating information on the operation of the organization ACORN. They are a news source. They might think it was a great idea selectively to decide which news organizations got to report that story, at least as long as it was 'hot.' Does that sound attractive? I think not. And then think of the difficulties of proof, the possibility of chilling of speech by wrongly claiming to be its source. Implementation would be a nightmare."

Making peace with the Internet

That's why this week's AP policy statement on attribution was so interesting. "In the age of the Web, the sourcing and reliability of information has become ever more crucial. So it is more important than ever that we be consistent and transparent in our handling of information that originated elsewhere than our own reporting," it began. "We should provide attribution whether the other organization is a newspaper, website, broadcaster or blog; whether or not it’s US based; and whether or not it's an AP member or subscriber."

Blogs! "Those who work in their pajamas" will be recognized when one of their stories bubbles up into the national media—something that happens with amazing frequency, and that often goes uncredited.

The AP document provides several examples of proper attribution, again making sure to includes blogs as potential sources of real news: "Suppose Blog Y reports that the government has compiled a secret report on something, but we’re the first to find out what it says. We should still say, lower in the story, that 'The existence of the report was first reported by Blog Y.'"

Now, the AP has been much better about providing both attribution and links recently—even when it comes to such crucial matters as a viral graphic depicting the "proper technique for exiting aircraft," designed by our own Aurich Lawson.

The AP does recognize one useful limit to today's linked, interconnected, social news ecosystem: "It’s important to note that we shouldn’t use facts from a non-member news organization, even with credit, so frequently that we appear to be systematically and continuously free riding on that organization’s work." As a general principle, this sounds pretty fair.

It's refreshing to see the AP move beyond some of its least-defensible rhetoric of the last year. The group doesn't foreswear the idea of a "hot news" right over the facts, but it does recognize just how many sources of breaking news now exist, and how much it relies on them. It doesn't admit that bloggers might operate in something other than pajamas, but it does recognize that they can serve as important story sources. Welcome to the, err, social.

How far has this subtle shift in thinking gone? Back in June, the AP rolled out a new version of its famous style guide, which includes a Social Media Guidelines section that "includes information and policies on using tools like Facebook and Twitter, how journalists can apply them to their work, and how to verify sources found through them. Also included are 42 separate entries on such terms as app, blogs, click-throughs, friend and unfriend, metadata, RSS, search engine optimization, smart phone, trending, widget and wiki."

Numerous individual AP writers have already taken these lessons to heart; a recent three-paragraph AP story consisted of little more than the verbatim tweet of a senior US State Department official. Fortunately for the AP, they didn't have to pay $17.50 or wait a set number of hours to reference the "hot news" contained in this particular tweet.