A.P. Moving to Halt Use of Newspaper Articles on Web Sites

This sure could be one of them.

The reason these newspapers aren't going after, say Drudgereport, is that they figure they can get some money out of Google. Fair use or not, why is Google rich and not the papers?

I'm having a hard time resisting the schadenfreude.

The problem, of course, is that as old forms of media die, the rule is "shift or be shafted," and the AP is likely not powerful enough to take on indexing and last.

Playing devil's advocate a bit, from the AP's perspective, how is Google really any different than any other distributor of AP content? It's just another company using their content to hang ads off of and generate revenue (like all of their other customers), except that Google doesn't pay for it.

AP makes money from volume, lots of papers subscribing to their feed. Google means that fewer papers are needed (it just needs to index one, doesn't it?), chopping the AP's customer base down and eventually making their current model completely obsolete. Seeing the writing on the wall and trying to prevent it from happening, that's not evidence they don't get it, that's evidence they get it all too well but just have no idea what to do about it.

Any thoughts on what to do about it? As far as I can tell, nobody has really figured it out yet, have they?

I, for one, would be taken aback if Google started actively playing King-maker. It's sad enough that one company has the ability to do what you say, but to actively flaunt that ability would cause me to search for another search engine of choice, and hopefully I'm not alone.

Besides, playing games with index-censoring would open up space for competitors (competing on the basis of not censoring, while hopefully having comparable result quality), which is not exactly in Google's best interest.

They are, too. No one seems to have a good idea about how to deal with the transition. Especially with the NY Times, you can't really blame them. They've been very open about the situation they are in and have been experimenting heavily. The AP, on the other hand, has been pretty aggressive and seems to believe they can fight off progress.

What you say is the standard line of thought on the AP that lots of hackers and new media folks take, but it's not based on reality.

If you link to an AP article instead of publishing the whole thing, you lose out on Google hits from both organic search and Google News. Even if 100 other people run the same article on their sites, Google's algorithm will reward you more for publishing it for the 101st time than it will if you just link to it on someone else's site.

Sending people away is great if it's the only thing you do. But if your strategy includes racking up pageviews with ads on them, then you MUST keep them on your site. So you rewrite other people's stories (Gawker), you quote/steal big chunks of other people's copy (Business Insider) and you make attribution links as small as posisble (Gothamist).

As long as you get more hits from running a full article over just linking to someone else's article, there's no incentive for publishers to do the sorts of things that seem so intuitive to us geeks.

The difference is that while Techmeme and Google news are only displaying the headlines and summaries, they are indexing the FULL article and making use of it to power their algorithms.

If they determine it that way, I don't see what the big deal is. If you want to use the Twitter API, you have to pay past a certain point. Maybe a year from now, if you want to index full news articles for your aggregator, you have to pay past a certain point as well. That wouldn't be too bad at all and would leave that act of linking safe and untouched.

And as for the user base, why do you think that they are closing down, because the user base is no longer there.

The more stuff like this I see the more I am convinced that new papers are heading for extinction.

Perhaps I should buy some so that I can sell them on eBay in a decade or so :)