AP, Quiet Please

Sunday, October 11th, 2009 08:10 pm GMT -5 in Content, Tubes by Michael Cervieri

I haven’t hidden how tired I am about the Associated Press‘s floundering attempts at relevance but I’ll do it once again.

Whether it’s tired campaigns about their content being “stolen,” or tired discussions about their content being “taken,” its a tired organization huffing and puffing on its last legs.

And this is too bad.

I mean no offense. AP content can be quite good. The idea behind the enterprise itself is noble. Unfortunately, the AP’s business hearkens back to some Luddite age that perhaps once was but will never be again. And the fatal AP flaw is that it constantly comes up with new plans and ideas that might have worked in that bygone age but have little relevance in the business of today.

The organization is not going to go quietly. While it generates cash less quickly than it hemorrhages it, the AP has notoriously spent millions trying to create some sort of new fangled digital rights management system that most technical observers concluded wouldn’t work.

Really, though, that’s the AP’s prerogative. If it decides it wants to create a non-generative, restrictive DRM news system, go ahead. It just runs so far against anything and everything that’s been successful in the content space that I’m surprised it’s suggested in the first place.

While few have answers, interesting solutions are those that are open and generative, meaning that others can build on top of them. Consider this. What’s going on here is in an example of building, linking and sharing that viewers accept, understand and participate in. AP blowback is simply one where it cannot understand why or how people aren’t paying the same dollar amount for that they once did.

And its repetitive moaning, groaning and threatening is getting tired.