You’re confusing an ideal of how media operates with reality. In this world, losing “independent media” wouldn’t matter much because that media doesn’t do much of value.

If you want people to care about media, you must have a media worth caring about. We don’t.

By their very nature, consulting and speaking gigs are limited. So I think it’s short-sighted to suggest that promoting a consulting business is any kind of model for media.

Jeff, please tell us how much you make from this blog! The fact is that _most_ – not all, but most – of those “wonders” are losing money.

Jeff Jarvis is doing a great job in trying to help news orgs to finally adopt to the new rules, to accept that Google has created a service that should have been created by the media 10 years ago (of course they haven’t done it because they were – still are – too focused on their old business).

I believe that Google knows how important the media product is, and from what I read in interviews with Eric Schmidt he (Google) does want a strong media industry himself.

My assumption is that if the media joined forces in a productive (as opposed to a protective) way and created a new accurately structured and comprehensively integrated content feed/API, Google would bet he first to sign the contract. And this wouldn’t be about short-term business only, it would also be about strategy and image, about Google being the good guy again and forever.

Rgd. Google has better robos: I think that Google Serps and Google News could do a lot better. There are too many false/irrelevant results and, for instance, wrongly attached images (at least on Google News Germany), and there is no drill down at all. Reuters’ OpenCalais is both technically and conceptually far ahead of what Google does.

This doesn’t help the AP, of course, but it shows them how to do it: go find the next innovator in content refinement, buy them and start the integration process as quickly as possible.

Google and others do robo better than AP/Reuters.

In short, outsiders are more capable and better positioned to execute that plan than AP/Reuters, so why do you see it as a way for AP/Reuters to survive?

Remember – no one outside AP/Reuters cares whether AP/Reuters survives. Yes, we want services, but we don’t much care who provides them.

BTW – Institutions don’t “have to” do anything. In fact, they typically die instead of making fundamental changes that would allow them to survive. Any “plan” which assumes otherwise is a fantasy.

Only communists believe that there should be an imposed, fixed value on the product of labor.

The free market says something very different: You are only worth what the market says you’re worth.

Curley admits that content has lost value. That’s the market speaking.

If the market says your content is only worth a penny, then it’s only worth a penny, and you don’t “deserve” a penny more. You only deserve what the market is willing to give you.

It has nothing to do with a network economy. It has to do with supply and demand. The “network economy” (if you want to call it that) has merely increased the supply and lessened the demand for any one specific piece of content, or the content from any specific supplier.

If media executives would think about this problem like business people rather than communists, perhaps they could find a solution.

- Instead of manual tagging it would have to be a mechanism like Reuters’ Calais

- Plus, and this is even more important, the AP would have to cooperate with their clients/shareholders in a way that Google & Co can’t (because most publishers still consider Google a worse enemy than AP i.e. publishers delivered their rich structures multi-media content back to the AP, and AP would A) add it to the general feed and B) use the stuff to continue the story telling (find new aspects, drill down deeper, add historical data, add links to it, etc.) in order to improve their own news product

@2 AP would have to share their profit with the publishers, yes, and that’s what they already do – as long as they are profitable

Okay, having in mind the mindset of the people involved both at the AP and at the publisher houses, this scenario is not going to happen, at least not within the next two or three years, and that could already be too late, I’m afraid.

But be it as it may, the only way for the AP (or similar agencies in other countries) to save their ass is

1. to collaborate with their clients/shreholders very intensively
2. to create something special and valuable from this cooperation
3. to license this new value to the big guys in the information/ad business

To make this happen, AP would have to focus on their core definition – being a (THE) service provider for publishers – instead of fighting windmills. If they worked on this very very hard, all the pieces would fall into place.

Neither seems to be true.

Of course, semantic tags could be added by news gatherers. In that case, the money goes to them, not AP.

However, if those tags aren’t worth enough, none of that matters.

But:

I do think that agencies like AP or dpa in Germany should work on aggregators of professional online content themselves, and they should add real value to the content – like (semantic web) meta data – and then they should license this structured data as a perfect live feed to Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and whoever wants it. I am sure Google & Co would be willing to pay for such a rich feed of high quality online content – just like they seem to be willing to pay for a Twitter feed.

In this scenario, everyone’s a winner,:

Google & Co
- get perfectly structured content, faster (even live)
- can better monetize it than (even on GNews)
- is the good guy even in the eyes of the publishers

AP or dpa
- collects millions from Google & Co
- finds a new and role in the industry
- will be profitable again

Publishers
- get significant revenue shares from the AP or dpa
- get even better search traffic (cuz Google offers better serps)
- don’t have to build paywalls anymore
- embrace Goolge & Co as friends (stupid war is over)

Users/Readers
- get better serps
- get better news services
- have access to all the content for FREE

I cannot see any reason for this concept not to take off, just look at what is going on with Twitter and the search engines right now … oh I so want this to happen

Cheers,
KP

There’s a long-entrenched mentality there that probably can’t be shaken.

Always the irony of a business cycle. The innovator pushes for change, for making things more streamlined, for choices, until which point they’re the establishment and don’t want/can’t innovate to keep up. And then we go ’round the wheel again.

It’s past time for Google search to cut off a couple of newspapers and AP to demonstrate that fact.

As to value of news, Craigslist and PennySaver proved that a lot of people were buying newspapers for the ads, not the news.

BTW – Content on buzzmachine is NOT free. No content is free. Consumers always pay in time and attention. In some cases, that can be monetized (to a point).