back to article The Internet's most evil company?

Information wants to be free? Au contraire, information wants to tell you all about itself, where, how and if you can use it, and it reserves the right to sue the crap out of you if you don't pay attention. Or at least, that seems to be the way a growing number of traditional publishing organisations view it - the internet has …

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  1. Pete 2 Silver badge

    headless chickens

    The thing that AP and its chums have failed to realise is that their industry is dead - it just hasn't stopped running around yet. Rather than spending their diminishing resources on fighting legal battles that are, in terms of their long-term effectiveness, irrelevant to the overwhelming majority of internet users, they should be developing a strategy that assumes the internet *will* be (if it isn't already) the dominant medium for news dissemination. The job of the directors, editors and leaders in the field is to protect the shareholders' investments and transition the obsolete practices, mechanisms and legal position into this medium. If they don't manage it, they'll just get steamrollered. Firing off lawsuits won't stop it, though it might just prolong the agony and deplete their finances and really piss-off their prospective customers.

    One thing we learned from The Alamo is that sheer weight of numbers is bloody hard to beat. So given that we have a handful of news, music and media organisations hunkered down and fending off technological threats. On the other hand we have half a billion bloggers, users and surfers who don't give a stuff about copyright and intellectual property (especially when it''s all in a foreign country). My money's on the horde!

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    My Two Votes for Most Evil Company

    The RIAA:

    http://www.boingboing.net/2009/07/29/movierecord-industry.html

    "We reject the view that copyright owners and their licensees are required to provide consumers with perpetual access to creative works."

    Lucid Intelligence:

    http://www.boingboing.net/2009/07/30/british-fraud-cop-qu.html

    "A former British fraud cop has assembled a database of 4,000,000 British identities, including credit card numbers and PINs, seemingly by buying data from hackers and phishers. Now he's selling access to the database to panicked members of the public who want to know if their identities have been stolen."

  3. mrweekender
    Big Brother

    Holy shit....

    ...."a law to control online news access" - yeah and soon a law to control your thoughts and then time for me to buy a fucking M16 with lots and lots of ammo!

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    A

    (worrying perhaps, but most definetly so) trend i've noticed recently is the introduction of sites offering content to those in one country but not in others, or differing content on news websites (without aknowledgement often) depending on location. This is of course easily bypassed using a proxy to set your location - which is by my understanding 'illegal'.

    Isn't this against the whole idea of the internet, globalisation and a 'flat platform'? In my opinion what really needs to be instigated is a countrywide law on the internet that allows complete freedom of information and culture and isn't built around laws which a) appear to relate to physical products b) outdated. c) routinely disobeyed and ignored by everyone who uses a computer/internet. d) apply differingly depending on your location. (please add more)

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    AP vs Google vs Apple vs RIAA vs ?

    So many choice, and so many good reasons, to name them "Most Evil". What to do, what to do?

  6. Colin Barfoot
    WTF?

    a stringer?

    I had do a select, ctrl-c, ctrl-t, ctrl-v, click, click, click to look that up. You're making slaves of us all here, John.

    And it didn't mean "busker" as I had expected.

  7. Jacqui Smith's DVD Collection!
    FAIL

    Simple

    It's time to turn our backs on them, they do not own the facts and they report with bias.

  8. Dave The Cardboard Box
    FAIL

    Evil? Yep but not for this reason

    AP, UP and Reuters bounce around speculative stories which are then published as facts for a couple of days until the truth comes out. No one apologises or prints retractions and the general public only remembers the original story.

    Any news organisation which doesn't do its own fact checking and depends on repeating gossip deserves to fail.

  9. Spoonsinger
    Happy

    @markweekender

    You have to remember that the M16 was kak in jungle warfare. You'll probably be better served getting an AK, (world wide support structure of the M16 is limited).

  10. Mr Young
    Pint

    what?

    Have they got a usa patent on cut and paste? Ooh, if only it were me! Ho,he,ha,sorry about that.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Pint

    It must be Friday

    Value Added News.

    DRM for shitty current affairs coverage.

    Friday beers for everyone. Good story again Mr Lettice.

    Cheers.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Simple solution for AP

    Don't publish on the Internet. Stick to printed media and then nobody can link to you and nobody else will care.

    AP and the RIAA can go fornicate with each other.

  13. John Lettice (Written by Reg staff)

    Re: a stringer?

    I'm sorry, I'm sure. I added a footnote just for you.

  14. John Lettice (Written by Reg staff)

    Re: It must be Friday

    It really, really is not DRM. It is information about the content, including copyright information, that is associated with the content by the publisher. There's an interesting and informative comment about its purpose on boingboing (hey, it happens, and it's from Ars anyway), here:

    http://www.boingboing.net/2009/07/29/associated-press-cla.html#comment-554107

  15. Adam Johnston
    Grenade

    The King Is Dead... Long Live what?

    So presumably if AP is 'dead' and can no longer sustain a business by reporting from Iraq, Iran, Afganistan, Darfur and Somalia you, Jimbo Wales and rest of the wiki-fiddlers will be on the next plane out?

    No? thought not.

    They are trying to protect the output of their members who worked and some cases actually risked their lives to bring the story to the eyes of the world. They might not know how to do it yet, but that doesn't make them evil. It's certainly not 'the internet's most evil company' unless they have started reporting dissidents to the Chinese authorities.

    Only crime I can see here is sinning against the church of Web2.0.

  16. The Indomitable Gall

    To all the naysayers...

    Where will we get our news from when the presses stop rolling and all the journos are made redundant? The people? On the internet, no-one can tell the difference between grass and astroturf. Remember that you get what you pay for, and if someone is willing to pay for the news, they'll pay.

    Many journos may be lazy or corrupt, but they're held in check by the fact that they're paid for by the public. Once the only source of income comes in a brown paper envelope, whose news will it be...?

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Whine, whine, whine....

    So the monastic scribes are complaining - again - that their quill pens are losing ground to technology and should continue to be protected by law...? Dear me, how sad, never mind...

    Move on, people, your centuries of easy profits and biased reporting are over. It isn't down to the internet now, so much as it's down to increasing CHOICE.... Most especially, choice as to which of a tiny number of rich media industrialists we wish have slanting our news and politics.

    I haven't bought one of the rags that style themselves as newspapers in 10 years. If the internet died tomorrow, it wouldn't change that.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    OWN THE FACTS?

    What the fuck is that? Does anyone own the facts? They just report the facts (as they see it - biased anyways).

    The earlier these morons are consigned to history bins, the better will this place be.

    I am still boiling over with this term! Really, what next will they own? Our thoughts and desires?

    Paris, cos even she doesnt OWN the fact about herself ! And doesnt care.

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Dictators...

    ...never like democracy.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Pint

    @John Lettice

    Thanks for the link, John. I remain sceptical however. I see this as a hop, skip and jump away from a proprietary AP-only news format perhaps with a special client which checks the VAN data (and your access rights) before unlocking the content. I'm thinking about the way certain PDF's can be locked down to inhibit functions like copy and paste.

    Maybe calling it DRM is a bit strong but the line between protecting original content and locking it down with DRM is fine and blurry at the same time. At what point does information relaying copyright and authorship details get used to stop 'unauthorised' users accessing the content in the first place? I'm no freetard but a news agency trying to retain control over the news it publishes online seem not to understand how using the internet as a distribution channel works. The news only has to pass through one iteration before someone else can publish it via their own channel and so it goes.

    Maybe they should just use Flash and serve the text as graphics. Again, good article. Maybe a good idea for a future workshop or survey thingymabob as it seems to have provoked reasonably level-headed discussion.

    Beer because...err....Paris...*hic*

  21. fajensen
    Black Helicopters

    Me prefer honest corruption

    """

    Once the only source of income comes in a brown paper envelope, whose news will it be...?

    """

    Whoever wants to pay to get it published of course; The Russians are twenty years ahead of "the west" already - but we will get there too, no problem.

    http://exiledonline.com/journalism-face-off-russian-shadiness-vs-american-objectivity/

  22. Aaron Em

    Pull quotes?

    What the hell's that about? Trust me, y'all are in no danger of creating a wall of text in the pitiful little area that's left over for content once the masthead, footer, and all that right-column garbage are in place.

  23. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Saw this story earlier this week ...

    Here's an entertaining reworked "re-imagining" of the process from Kiyoshi Martinez' blog ...

    http://18.media.tumblr.com/U4AL323QvqdwytmeGrnA1zOXo1_500.jpg

  24. Chris Thomas Alpha
    Flame

    Something everyone seems to miss

    Is that in order for that information to be known, someone had to find it out, investigation sometimes takes lots of hours on the phone, to talk and encourage people to talk about things that are worth writing about.

    How much would you pay a guy who would get factual information from a stone? Maybe you come across a guy who can literally extract blood from a stone, would you pay real money for that

    So this guy, needs to eat and somewhere to sleep, you say that the facts are out there and they are free to get hold of, but at some point, a real human obtains the information a real human inputs that into the computer and a googlebot just blatently steals it without paying for nothing and the newspaper who paid that guy to obtain those facts, gets nothing.

    Does this seem fair?

    ok, you want free news, pay someone else to obtain it, why should someone pay a guy to get that bloody from that stone and then you just take it for nothing and re-use it.

    ok, even better, sometimes what makes a good news story, is not the raw facts, but the presentation of those facts. So who gets paid when those facts and presentation is ripped off?

    I understand that information wants to be free, I get all that, but when a real person collates that information in such a way that allows others to take it for free and not pay anything back, then to me, thats wrong, that guy has to get paid, that company has to get paid, if you dont want to pay.

    find the information yourself.

    Yeah, lets see how that pans out, you think all those bloggers are going to do the dirty work of hitting offices, hitting phones, finding out things, investigating trash cans, etc, etc.

    most of those guys never left their home to do any of this, they just opened google.com, regurgitated what they saw and they get paid the advertising hits on their site.

    Doesnt anyone else see something wrong with that???????

  25. Fred W

    Who's really whining?

    Wah! Wah! Why do I have to pay for electricity? It's just THERE when I plug something in! Wah! Wah! Why do I have to pay to make a phone call? Nobody has a patent on radio waves! Wah! Wah! Why do I have to pay for petrol? I just pull the lever and it comes out the hose! Wah! Wah!

    I'd be willing to bet that none of you righteously indignant have ever created anything of value from the whole cloth. I earn a living doing just that, and don't intend to do it for no reward just because a locust-cloud of "gatherers" and "sharers" want at it.

  26. Lu
    Big Brother

    Re: To all the naysayers

    Sometimes you need to repeat a point when it's really important, so I'm gonna repeat what others have said:

    Sir, you do realise that all these media companies do is push biased, one sided reporting on us every single day. Mainly because the entire news media industry is owned by a small group of people with a common agenda (Rupert Murdoch et al)

    So no, we don't want their news. We want real journos who actually check facts, research stories, and then report them to us, rather than just cut-and-paste the current propoganda.

    So as far as I'm concerned, the sooner these archaic behemoths die, the better. At least on the Internet I can choose where I get my news from.

    On another note, Colin Barfoot, you coulda saved yourself at least 1 click and a ctrl-v if you were using Opera - ctrl-c, ctrl-t, right-click, "paste and go" - it's the little things that make it so good.

  27. jon 77

    @Colin Barfoot & Lu:

    you need use and learn Opera better: :) :)

    mark text , right click, search with, wiki or google ... its there as standard in V10... be daring and try it!!

    http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/

  28. jon 77

    AP dont need to worry...

    roughly 20% of the country has *no clue* how to use a computer, beyond baby steps (email, a page or two a week..)

    about 10% do know, but until you can get a 'laptop' you can fold under your arm, wil get a wifi signal at the deepest point of the underground, etc, etc, paper is still the best solution.....

    the rest of the country have always got a paper, and dont care much for who produces it, they are too busy working to bother about big, expensive, complex things like PCs, until the above is possible....

  29. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    re headless chickens

    While it may be the AP is dead, that is hardly a good thing. 99% of blogs that make any sense only do so because they rip stories out of newspapers, even if some do at least attempt to re-write them in their own words.

    When newspapers are gone there will be no true reporting done. Certainly we won't get anything worthwhile from bloggers, who are mostly either content thieves or those who fill pages with inane blather and thrilling stories about the weird dream they had last night. Cable news networks on TV aren't much better, more concerned over the death of a weirdo called Michael Jackson than events that actually matter in the world.

    Just because half a retarded generation think that nothing outside of Twitter and Facebook matters, that doesn't make it so.

    "Will Facebook and other social networking sites save Iran?"

    That was actually a serious question polled by CNN and should tell you everything you need to know about the people running TV news channels.

    So all we're left with are newspapers and a few satirical websites who employ or contract people who were once newspaper reporters. Even The Register seems only able to bring us the quality of story they publish because their contributors are real news people that have real sources and real knowledge about investigative journalism.

    Stories about prison abuses in Iraq, torture by the CIA, warrantless wiretapping by the Bush administration would all have gone unnoticed or at least unreported if it wasn't for newspaper reporters.

    To suggest some dick wittering on about keeping the starving and half-drowned scum out of his office building during the aftermath of Katrina somehow replaces the stories about why Bush called repairing and replacing New Orleans levies frivolous pork is the kind of inane bullshit I've come to expect from the blogging world.

    This 'hero' may have been the entertainment equivalent of watching bodies being carried away from a car accident, but a replacement for real reporting he was not.

    So fuck off really. If newspapers do disappear it will be extremely bad, leaving politicians free to do as they will confident that the only 'reporting' done is a bunch of flame-filled blogs about the latest phone Ashton Kutcher uses.

    What worries me is I don't see an economic model that will work for these papers. People are turning to free news sites, often run by the newspapers themselves, for their information and by the time they realised there was no real reporting being done it would be too late.

    It's certainly too late to start charging for news as some are advocating. That leaves online advertising and only Google seem to know how to make that a profitable business.

  30. jon 77

    @AC 31st July 2009 23:11 .....

    er, see my last comment....

    newspapers will *never* disappear, until the tech is that versatile... around the year 3000???

    you seem to be stuck in your own fanciful blog...

    and it also works the other way I have seen many stories start on the net, to appear in some paper the next day!!!

  31. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    (untitled)

    Sounds like PA are trying to run a finders keepers operation, i.e i saw it first, it's mine. Surely this strategy can't apply to life for obvious reasons ( we all see it all the time, what happens when two reporters witness the same event?)

    Also i reckon that probably 50% of their "news" comes from the internet in the first place.

    Face it the press is nearly dead and still trying to cut their own throats.

  32. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    WTF

    Does anyone remember WMD in Iraq? The same biased News aggregators taking their cue from Cheney & Co. The Murdochs & APs happily obliged and it was "researched" and Journos "risked life & Limb" to uncover these Wmds!

    They also spent lots of money in doing so (Paid for by the CIA & Oil companies, I guess) to bring the "scoop"and win awards for "Investigative & Courageous undercover Journalism" and save the world from catastrophe.

    Now they even "OWN THE FACT".

    WTF again?

  33. Tony Paulazzo
    Alien

    RSS feeds

    I get an RSS feed from the guardian daily to my Outlook and would be more than happy to pay a (reasonable) monthly fee, for this, plus maybe some kind of privileged access to their website - a comments section only for members say, or a forum. Make it voluntary and I think more people would pay than you expect (the royal you, not specifically aimed at anyone).

    I'm sometimes a freetard, but I always support those I deem worthy - The Guardian, El Reg, Tech Dirt etc. I fully agree that those who create stuff, either creatively or as part of their job need to eat etc, but I also think, the DRM/rights police have gone too far into the draconian sphere to be healthy.

    Three installs of a game you paid £40 for to kill the second hand market (nothing to do with pirates that one), Ebooks that can be remotely deleted on a whim (I know it's more complicated than that, but these books were - by any meaningful interpretation of the law, out of copyright), putting your news business on the web, then complaining because the web works thru links and copy pasting (like it was designed to)...

  34. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Check your facts

    @ Jon77 Over 25% of the population have *never* been online - I'm not going to bore you with a bibliography of the relevant research, just google Oxford University's Internet Institute or the national network of UK online centres, go to the research sections and look it up.

    Anyway, I'm not sure it's relevant to the argument - those people who currently don't go online aren't going to be affected by any shift in how news is presented or controlled on the internet anyway. Everyone seems to be have ignored TV news in this debate so far - although I don't have figures to back this opinion up, a lot of people must get their news primarily from that source - and nothing I've read here threatens their future.

  35. fajensen
    Flame

    It's over already!

    """

    If newspapers do disappear it will be extremely bad, leaving politicians free to do as they will

    """

    ... Which is pretty much what happens now, *with* the newspapers reporting on it!

    The first problem is that news & other media are not important any more: People wants to live in their own little bubble of reality where they are always right and they do not have to do anything that they do not want to do - including thinking for themselves.

    The second problem is that the political system has perfected looting and corruption to the point where no one amongst the public bats an eye over the politicians sticky fingers and the different ways the law works for Them and Us - They are all the same, so voting doesn't even matter - while *everyone* has learned the lesson that the only real way forward in life is to game the system to their best ability.

  36. Lu
    Thumb Up

    Re: re headless chickens # By Anonymous Coward Posted Friday 31st July 2009 23:11

    I disagree, I think you've missed the point.

    We still want journalists, we just don't want them working for Rupert Murdoch. With newspapers dying, journalists will evolve to be employed by actual news sites - most likely small, region specific, independant companies who drive users to their site based on the quality, accuracy and speed of their reporting. Much like El Reg, I guess.

    Oh and thanks to jon 77, no idea how I missed that option all this time. Any way to make it open in a new tab? (I'm happy now that I've found my browser's even more convenient)

  37. Chris Thomas Alpha
    Flame

    @Lu

    Thats the point you dimwit, something you don't seem to get.

    If there are no dedicated people out there to obtain that news and report it, you won't have a cloud of mindless morons with blogs with which to repeat it to you in a way that you understand.

    It's something none of you get.

    Nobody, with a blog, will goto iraq to get shot at, so where are you going to get your news of iraq from??? Some guy on wordpress.com???? are you serious???

    OH YEAH and furthermore, for all you dumbasses out there who think that news can actually be objective, here we have it, word to the masses, NO NEWS IS OBJECTIVE, everything is subjective to the POV of the person reporting, whether that person is agreeing with your world view or not, depends on whether you like them or not.

    Why does nobody get this?? it's like, Journo 101 or something.

    You guys are all running around saying, death to the dicatator, death to the dictator, without even knowing what their death will cause. Without them, you won't have no blogs to read, because they will have nothing to report. They will just increase the number of crap articles with no content because waht other chice will they have???

    "what? goto iraq?? No way dude, there is no 3g in iraq and people NEED to read my twitters otherwise those people will get out of touch with the world!!"

    get over yourself, the only reason you can critisise people is because they have given you something to criticise, without them, you'd have nothing, if I was AP, I would flash site my entire system and show you a lovely flash site to read everything from, with images as text so you cant copy and paste. At least then you'll have to improve your typing skills, cause it's the only way you can steal my shit.

    If I was clever, that is what I would do. Unfortunately, they are not very clever.

  38. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge

    Front Running is Lead by Proxy but only with a Future Truth and not a Past Flaw.

    "So fuck off really. If newspapers do disappear it will be extremely bad, leaving politicians free to do as they will confident that the only 'reporting' done is a bunch of flame-filled blogs about the latest phone Ashton Kutcher uses." .... By Anonymous Coward Posted Friday 31st July 2009 23:11 GMT

    AC,

    Haven't you yet realised that politicians are newspapers' bitches and only survive in office and the people's mind because of their support/pimping and pumping/fluffing. Here is one of todays blatant desperate trash offerings/mission impossible brainwashings ..... http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8180056.stm.

    "The thing that gets ignored when the newspaper barons huff and puff about wholesale theft is that journalism is by nature heavily derivative (which is the kindest way of putting it), peppered with repetition, follow-ups and plain old-fashioned lifting. Look too hard under that particular stone and it all falls apart. Not that it isn't all falling apart already, of course." ... John Lettice

    And aint that the gospel truth, John. In its Place though, does IT replace the SNAFUFUD with FantastIQ Offers with Unprecedented Amazing Opportunities for Registers which have earned, or have been granted, Privileged and Unlimited Access to Unique Sources with Collaborating Intelligent Allies.

    MeThinks M'Lud Mandelson needs some Intensive and Extensive Therapy for his Grand Delusional Psychosis. And please feel free to quote/copy and paste/use that news, with or without originating source reference, for who cares whenever there are more important things to do/talk about for others to do ......... which is what Virtual Leadership is all about, is IT not?

  39. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge

    Re: Something everyone seems to miss ...

    .... By Chris Thomas Alpha Posted Friday 31st July 2009 18:54 GMT

    Amen to that Instructive Comment, Chris. QuITe a Few have Realised your Concerns and would Correctly Address them Constructively via Virtual TelePortation Means .... Quantum Memes.

    A Little Something XXXXtra ESPecial from Head Offices in Cyber Security.

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  40. ZenCoder

    why not markup the news even more ...

    I'd love to see them create a markup language for new reporting ... so that anyone reading a story could optionally see where all the "facts" in a story came from.

    If some news story says for instance that 7,000 people a year die from toaster related accidents, I would be interested to know if they got that from the Toaster Safety Institutes 2007 report or if they just googled it and picked a number that looks good.

    In that regard I feel more confident getting numbers from wikipedia than a news story .. wikipedia often cites its sources and you can go and check for yourself ... or decide the source isn't trustworthy.

  41. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Does AP create content?

    AFAIK,

    AP takes content from somewhere else, dilutes it down to a no-content state, tags a headline to the remains and sends it away. We have these free Subway papers here and its all AP content, err, all AP headlines I mean as there is -no- content to speak of at all...

    AP might be good for others but its mostly about hot gas from my point of view...

    Regards.

  42. Steve Roper

    The future of news

    was predicted rather succinctly back in 2004 by an interesting video:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQDBhg60UNI

    Some of you will already have seen this, but it certainly addresses this issues discussed in this article. In the video, the narrator gives a brief history of the Internet up to 2004, then continues on to 2014 by predicting the fall of Microsoft, the amalgamation of Google and Amazon (that would be an interesting anti-trust case!) into a polyglot called Googlezon (!) and the eventual rise of EPIC - Evolving Personalised Information Construct. Of particular interest is the description of EPIC: "At its best, to its savviest readers, EPIC is a summary of the world, deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything ever available before. But at its worst, and for too many, EPIC is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow and sensational."

    While this may not actually come to pass, the decline of the traditional news sources in the fae of the free-for-all that is today's Internet seems inevitable. And without the tireless journos hunting down these stories it seems that the future of news is destined to fall into the mould of EPIC. And that would be a shame.

  43. Lu
    Thumb Down

    @ Chris Thomas Alpha

    I never said a thing about blogs. Why do you need newspapers to have journalists? In our "post-Internet" society, journalists could just as easily be paid by websites (are already, in fact).

    After all, the sceanrio I suggested is how newspapers themselves got started some years ago (small, local papers reporting on their own region / area of expertise and expanding over time)

    I think you're confusing my comments with your own preconception that in lieu of the newspaper conglomerates, all we'd be left with is a few bloggers.

  44. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    a title is requiered im told

    Yeah news are gona be so usefull when there are no jurnalists to go gather the news. Who excatpy gathers the news for all the "online" news sites? the sites tyhat copy from AP and there likes are gona get there news from where if AP goes away? Clearly the people that thinks stuff just appears when needed/wanted never left there moms basement and to be honest. They are better off never leaving.... better for the rest of us aswell.

  45. Rob 30

    non-murdoch reporters

    I think some people may be talking at cross purposes, we want professional, trained, unbiased reporters who are not paid by murdoch.

    in the US that leaves pretty much nowt as far as i know, but here in the UK we have the bbc which is maybe not as impartial as it once was, but employs professional reporters.

    i'm pretty sure they do world coverage, so you'd still get 'proper' news if AP went away.

  46. J Ford

    @Rob30

    The news content of the BBC has become increasingly dominated by bought-in news (dominated by US stories as it saves on translation costs), articles generated from press releases, or plugs for BBC programmes (I stopped watching breakfast news as it seemed to consist solely of footage from Strictly Come Dancing or other 'entertainment news' drivel) . Traditional journalist numbers have been heavily reduced in cost-cutting and replaced with non-content, some of which is lifted from the internet (there seems to be an obsession with Twitter which I hope will pass quickly). Front line reporting is a rarity. This from an institution not reliant on advertising revenue, which should not incur any loss from free distribution of their content.

    Proper journalism is important, as the alternative is the unaccountable whinging of a billion bloggers, regurgitating each other's lies, prejudices and conjecture as fact (or FACT to use the preferred syntax).

    I've noticed a lot of link farms are copying entire news articles in an attempt to draw traffic, if you come across an unattributed story somewhere and google a selected quote in order to find the original source you may have to wade through pages of this crap before finding the original story source. There needs to be some control on this for reasons of functionality at least (a 'report link farm' button on Google with consequent demotion in search engine results would help).

  47. Graham Bartlett
    Badgers

    @Lu, John186

    Maybe you can choose where you want to look online for news, but the news has to *get* there somehow. And contrary to your opinions, there *are* journalists risking their lives to get the important stories. It's not uncommon for these journalists to be freelance locals - (a) it saves money getting folks out there from London, and (b) your average white journalist tends to stand out a bit, which reduces their life expectancy and limits where they can go to get accurate reports. Sure, they're doing it for the money, and they know the risks. But they're still putting their lives on the line so that you can get accurate facts.

    Yeah, there's also plenty of so-called "journalists" getting the latest so-called "news" about Paris Hilton or Jordan. If muppets choose to buy their turdspurtly output, that's their choice. Ditto, if you choose to buy papers run by Murdoch, or subscribe to TV channels run by Murdoch, again that's your choice. "Choice" means that some people will choose that, but you have the right not to.

  48. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    @Chris Thomas Alpha

    Not sure which publication you work for; but the way I see it; the news is already up on the internet. You can get a link to yourself (which the complaint acknowledges is being done); or you can not get the traffic coming to your site.

    Personally, no traffic means no visitors, which means no income. Yet we know what your boss is going to do, right; the loss of business will be blamed on the linked content. NOT on his being a bumbag.

  49. Wrenchy
    Linux

    DAMN!

    And here I thought this was an article about Apple....

  50. Kelley Johnston

    I disagree with the article's title's premise

    This isn't the RIAA, folks, they're not suing poor motherless orphans or kicking babies. They're simply trying to adjust the way they present their content to the Internet. They're well within their rights to try; it's their pipeline, after all, and if they cave in to the bloggers and abandon the effort we'll all be poorer. Unless you intend to crowd source the data; all good if you do, but then you may be at the mercy of people with a barrow to push.

    I suggest that a company's published values are usually a good indication of whether they're a true news organisation or not. This isn't your everyday shock-jock organisation.

    http://www.ap.org/newsvalues/index.html

  51. andy 45

    ARS

    *chuckle*

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