Good Google search tips

Via Sarah Marshall. And she has a link to even more "site" operator tricks.

Google Maps Engine issue

If you use Google's new maps engine, you need to be aware of a problem in using the "share" button.

When you do, it produces a link like this:

https://mapsengine.google.com/map/viewer?mid=zPZH3TAj6XZQ.knDBdB (That's not a complete link because it goes to a student's work in progress.)

The problem is that "viewer" in the URL. If you click on it and are not signed into Google, you get nothing. Not very good for sharing stuff with the general public - or with your professor for grading (grin).

The solution is to substitute "embed" for "viewer."

You'll find more details here:
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/maps-engine/issues-and-troubleshooting/8YU8YVj36yA

Let's hope Google recodes that button.

Google taking flak

There was the ouburst of unhappiness last week when it was announced Google Reader was being phased out, and now there are broadsides against the search giant for problems with Google Alerts (which I have to agree has been sucking lately).

Here's the deal, folks. This decade is going to be pay to play. Many of these free services were launched with the idea they could be ad supported. We know where that's gone with the media, so why does anyone think it would be different with anything else?

Sure, some will stay free (there's always the motive to get people in the door or there will be other objectives, such as Google's and Facebooks' massive data-gathering efforts -- if you'e buying FB stock, you're not buying a social media company but a huge database you hope can be monetized). And with churn there will be new free ones popping up.

But if you make them part of your workflow, get ready to pony up. It's going to be a cost of business.

Google's power searching course

I am having fun this week taking Google's online power searching course.

Some of it is very familiar for anyone who does a lot of searching, but there is some mind-widening stuff in here, too. For instance, I hadn't thought about using the color filter on images to narrow down specific types of things (the black and white option, for instance, will pull out charts and graphs that tend to be in B&W).

There's also the ability to find KML data using the "filetype" filter and feed that link back into Google maps to quickly create a useful map.

I'd recommend that most journalists and journalism students take this. It's six classes with five or so lessons per class. All are on video, but you can download the documentation from Google Docs to have a hard copy.

Gingras retrospective

Given the recent remarks by Richard Gingras, head of Google News, on the future of newspapers, it's also worth listening to this 90-minute recording of his 2009 appearance at the annual Convergence and Society conference co-sponsored by the Univ. of SC and Univ. of Nevada.

(At this point, let me also make a pitch for you to get your free subscription (email link) to the Convergence Newsletter, which showcases papers from this annual conference and others as well as tales from the field to bridge academic research and professional practice. We'd love it if you'd contribute articles too.)
Video streaming by Ustream

Editing lesson - why Goog is not enough

Here's a lesson for your editing classes - or for any journalist, for that matter - as to why relying on Google (or any other single source, especially in these days of ubiquitous data that also contains easily propagated errors).

I gave my editing class a simple car-train accident story the other day. It happened on Bonhomme Richard Drive in Lexington County. But many students went into a tizzy because it was listed differently on Google:

Now, those of us who've been around awhile probably have some sense that Goog was in error. If you have a sense of French, you know it's Bonhomme Richard, or maybe stuck back in the corners of the brain is the factoid that several U.S. warships have had that name.

But these days it is easy - and imperative - to check multiple sources. In the editing room, we have paper maps on the wall (I know, how quaint, except Google does not list county boundaries or subdivisions, both important for a local journalist.)

A quick run over to Mapquest shows this (which is also on that paper map):

And just running "Bonhomme Richard Lexington" through a Google and Bing search pulls up numerous real estate listings with the correct name.

Of course, preponderance of the evidence is not good enough in journalism, so my students should have checked with us, which some did. But the disappointment was that they were relying only on Google. What if I had put "Richard Bonhomme" in the copy? They most likely never would have asked.

Anyhow, victory is ours! OK, too much caffeine there so early in the morning. But Goog did confirm the error once I pointed it out.

I hope you'll find this useful as an example you can use in class and elsewhere.

Google removes plus operator from searches

And the hoi polloi ain't happy about it.

Apparently Google+ has the great masses of unwashed misusing the "+" operator that allowed you to specify that a term had to appear in the search.

Now, Google says it has expanded the functionality of the quote marks so that if you put a single word in quotes, it will also require that word to appear in the search.

Wonder how the research librarian community feels about this.

Google Maps to developers: Prepare to pay up

Google is enforcing limits on maps called through its API -- 2,500 loads a day for a styled map (available sice May 2010) or 25,000 a day for regular maps.

It doesn't affect our little corner of the world at Dateline Carolina - we just link to a "mymap" and have low usage. But it does have the development community atwitter.

Social networking: Google Plus

Or, more correctly, "Google +" - now released in beta.

It has some interesting features, and I predict we will see some people defect from Facebook and others add it as their truly private social network (I think many folks are going to keep FB for some time because it is, right now, the town square of the Web. PC World has a good rundown.

I definitely can see this catching on with my students.

However, the Financial Times does point out the "resharing" feature
could be a privacy hole (you can apparently turn that off, but not easily)


Computerworld  suggests that with a little tweaking to work with Google Docs, this could be a solution for collaboration within organizations (certainly would have to be better than the ill-fated Google Wave).

So this will be one more thing newsrooms will have to think about - and it reinforces the management challenges. It's so much easier when you have a Facebook that gives you "one stop shopping" to reach an audience, but it's not going to be that way anymore. It's going to take serious thought about where your audience is and how to reach them - not just mindless, robotic distribution.

Google announces chromebook

(In recovering some earlier posts that had not been published, this one inexplicably moved to the top. It is an older post of about a week ago.)
 
Google has just announced the chromebook - not so much a computer as a cloud portal in a laptop box running Chrome.

Its big selling points:

• Almost instant startup
• No real internal programs
• Everything on the cloud
• Automatic background updates

From Google's promo site: Thanks to the power of HTML5, many apps keep working even in those rare moments when you're not connected.

Color me cautious right now - if only because in a few weeks I am headed to a place - for more than a "rare moment" - where I will NOT have high speed access (yes, such places do still exist, even here in the good old U-S-of-A). It's another decade, I think, before we get affordable, ubiquitous high speed access.

Yet, I can definitely see a place for this on, say, a college campus, where usage and access are concentrated. Can we see a day where these become standard issue to students?

Put this in a tablet, and I might like it even better.

Commentary on AP-Google deal

Lots of trumpeting last week about AP's new deal with Google in which the search-engine giant gets continued access to AP stories and will host them while paying an undisclosed sum, and, perhaps more important, giving AP lots more data about how its content is accessed and viewed.

But Frederic Filloux, in a Monday note, questions whether AP (and AFP, for which he has consulted) is following the wisest path:

Unable to position itself as a genuine partner to the media sphere, Google tries to fracture it by striking deals left and right. In this divide and conquer respect, the AP agreement is a good one — from a Google standpoint. First, Google buries the hatchet for good with AP, transforming a contentious relationship into a true partnership. Second, this deal is a major departure from the “snippets strategy”,  in which, until now, Google News contented itself by crawling thousands of sources and extracting headlines and short abstracts. Under the the new AP-Google agreement, Google pays an undisclosed amount of money to AP and provides precious traffic data — in exchange of full stories. (To be complete, AFP also has its own deal with Google, although a more modest one). ... Thanks to its deal with the two newswire agencies, Google is now in the self-sustaining news business.
For AP and AFP, these licensing deals with the search engine go against developing their own business to consumer website. Frankly, who will go to their home pages when Google News already hosts the newswires stories, with a better access, and… native search engine optimization?  Why build a website that will compete against a full licensing deal? It doesn’t make sense.

Filloux also questions whether both agencies can - and should - remain member-owned cooperatives. The piece is aptly titled "The Newswire Quandary."

J-lab/New Voices: Peering into the future

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked at a state press association meeting to peer into the future and try to give the assembled publishers and editors a sense of where things might be going.

I talked about HTML5, which will be multimedia oriented (here's the summary from Wikipedia and the gory details from W3C, if you really want to wonk out). I also talked about augmented reality through apps such as Layar, geocoding and the idea of a Web without Web sites. (Think about it - the last time you whipped out the smartphone and punched the button on that app, did you go to a Web site? Chances not, yet you certainly had an online experience.)

I also stressed that every news operation, even the smallest community one that hasn't been hit that hard by the recession, needs a mobile strategy. Why? Because even in the backroads and hamlets, that thing people are carrying around in their purses and on their belts ain't a newspaper, Bubba. Cell phone/smartphone technology is following Moore's law of doubling in power, etc., about every 18 months.

But Amy Webb of Webb Media Group can do it a lot better than I can, and she was at the J-lab confab today, so I'm just going to run out the notes I took and let you follow whatever links your hearts desire.

But you've got to sit through the 10-second commercial first: What contact I've had with Webb and through those I know in the industry, she's been about as accurate as anyone about all this. Do yourself a favor; visit Knowledgewebb, her company's training site, and sign up for her free newsletter. You might find something else you like (that costs extra, however).

Now the show:

Tools that can work for you:

What's important and what can wait? How nimble must you be? Do consumers really want everything out there.

Ask yourself:
- Who are you really developing for?
- Will it stick?
- Is it comprehensive enough?
- Will it generate engagement that is habit forming?
- Do you need all the features?

Six spheres, social media is a part of all of them that ties it together:
Traditional media
Web ("just stuff you get going online")
Mobile
E-readers
Tablets (iPad gets all the publicity, but her firm is tracking 18 from 18 manufacturers, some yet to be released)
Connected TV (plug your TV into the Internet/ AT&T's FIOS fiber-to-house broadband vastly expanding options).

Computers in cars: "Pretty soon you're going to be driving a computer down the road."

Do not assume that people are only engaging in traditional or web spheres because of social or economic status. (Doug's comment: Mobile, for instance, is becoming so cheap that for many people it is leapfrogging the traditional computer and is the way they are accessing online.)

Trend 1: User engagement 2.0
It's being offered in unusual places, it's not just tweeting the latest thing, new media organizations have found a "sweet spot" of producing content and getting content contributed. You have to be part of the community to really understand.

Social media being incorporated in unexpected places. Land's End, Netflix, for example, have incorporated social networks.

Ask yourself:
- Who is the audience?
- Are they where you think they are?
- What are the expectations of the audience (tell others? contribute? you listen?)?
- Are you willing to participate?

Keep the sharing options on your site to a minimum - the ones your audience is using.
She does not like AddThis or Shareomatic and similar services. Says they produce too confusing a list, most of which people seldom use. Points, for instance, to Mashable, which has just Twitter, Facebook, Digg, RSS and e-mail. But for this to work you have to know where your audience is sharing. (See Quarkbase below.)

Tools:
Quarkbase – get site metrics, most popular social media referrals
Facebook Connect –Problem is that with Facebook you can lose lots of data.
Disqus – aggregate comments (My note: I've had mixed results on various sites that have it installed; sometimes it seems to get into weird loops.)
KnowEm – plug in your username and it will go through all the social networks and see who has your name already.

In discussing content management systems, Webb's one recommendation was to get off Expression Engine (the CMS Media General is using for Hartsville Today, the local site I am involved with). She sees it as less extensible and flexible than most of the others.

Trend 2: Geolocal engagement
Why the hyperlocal model does not work. Things like LoudonExtra (the Washington Post's defunct site) and Everyblock just can't be hyperlocal enough or don't deliver the information the way people want it. Webb says Everyblock, for instance, gets fewer than 200,000 visits/month and that AOL-Patch metrics are "awful."

Consumers want to know what is happening, but they want more sophistication. Content has to be niche. Otherwise there is too much competition, too many platforms. She used this example of a smart phone app, Offender Locator, that takes data like Everyblock's but lets the user query it wherever he or she is -- it is location aware -- and pull down a list of sex offenders nearby.

For the consumer local is where I am right now, not necessarily physical; just as likely topical. Less about ZIP code and more about what I am doing right now. Real-time! Not just about maps and citizen-journalism. Action must be associated with content and conversation – context must be social.

Twitter, for instance, now has location info and the accompanying privacy concerns.
She calls this the check-in culture accompanied by a rapid change in user expectations.
- Your consumers want hyperlocal, but the way they define it.
- Tied to local.
- Socially interactive.
- Wrapped in opportunity (points, games)
- Not repurposed or stale.

Some other tools:
- Micello – maps for the inside of buildings. She showed some shopping malls. Someone raised the idea, however, that this will last "until homeland security shuts it down."
- Foursquare – "Twitter with location" as you "check in" to places. However, there also is a gaming aspect – get badges based on how many check-ins.
- Gowalla – she doesn't like it as much as Foursquare, but it's an alternative.
- Miso (gomiso.com) – connect with others while watching movies, videos, etc.
- Apple's iGroup allows you to set up a local social network where you are.
- Create your own iPhone check-in app through Double Dutch, $499 setup fee and $40 a month.
- Fourwhere: See what Foursquare users who have checked in from a location say about it.

Trend 3: Augmented reality
Two aspects to this: Show a coded marker to a webcam and cause an action to happen (think Esquire's recent augmented reality edition) or use the camera on your mobile phone, linked to geocoding or image recognition.

Some examples:
- Wikitude: An app available for all phones – install it, point your phone camera at something, like a monument, and get information about it.
- Post office: Hold item you want to ship up to camera and virtual box simulator will tell you size box, etc.
- Rayban: Virtual mirror allows you to "try on" glasses.
- Acrossair: Among other things, makes apps that allow you to hold up yout iPhone and see nearest subway stations in the direction you are holding it.
- Toozla: Voice activated augmented reality
- Layar: Maybe the most widely known, out of Holland, put the app in your phone and you can look at several "layers" of information such as shopping, real estate, etc. Or you can create your own.
- StreetSpark: Augmented reality dating application. Use your phone to see if any fellow sparkers are near you; strike up a conversation (or … whatever).
- Recognizr – Point a phone at a person's face and find out what social networks they are on (not public, but available business to business).
- Face.com: Tool being used by Google's Picasa photo site. From the Picasa site: Picasa scans all the photos in your collection, identifies the ones with faces, and groups photos with similar faces together. It's easy to add name tags to dozens of photos at once by clicking "Add a name" below a photo and typing the person's name. Once you've tagged some pictures, you can make a face collage with one click, easily find all your pictures with the same two people in them, or upload your name tags to Picasa Web Albums.
- Google Goggles: Scan logos, books, text, etc., and get info returned.

Bottom line:
- People are uploading content
- They are tagging content
- They are geocaching that content
- It's creating wide databases of info that can link people to locations and history of actions
- Consumers are starting to search and discover via social networks and mobile instead of the traditional search engine.

(Follow up: Webb's remarks Monday at ASNE.)

Google explains news SEO

Want to know how Google performs search engine optimization on news sources. It's explained (sort of - not all the secret sauce is revealed) in this video:




Google's "webmaster channel" has other good things, too.

And specifically for publishers http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/

Four myths of media

According to "The Moguls' New Clothes" in the October edition of The Atlantic, the four are:

• Growth is good.
• Globalzation is good
• Content is king
• The cult of convergence

In an excerpt from their book "The Curse of the Mogul: What's Wrong with the World's Leading Media Companies," Jonathan Knee, Bruce Greenwald and Ava Seave argue that:

• Most of the growth appears to have come from mergers and acquisitions done at prices that make their financial success unlikely.
• The problem with going global is that it actually increases your competition because fixed costs are easier to justify relative to the possible overall gains. The global strategy also comes as consumers are turning inward for their information
• Content isn't king because those who create it, not those who sell it, get most of the benefits. "Put simply, the core of any competitive advantage more often than not drives from the manner of aggregation, rather than the creation of content. It is no coincidence that Google ... is an aggregator, not a content company.
• Convergence ultimately comes down to breaking down barriers and "[w]henever someone suggests that breaking down barriers to entry is good news, hold tight to your wallet."

Their conclusion? The way to make money in the media business these days is to, essentially, tend to your knitting. In other words, the money comes from running largely mature businesses efficiently.

There's another way to put that: Cut costs ruthlessly and don't invest in "a clearly dissipating franchise." Welcome to the first decade of the new (media) century.

Google Wave and Bing

If you've kept up with any of the tech buzz in the past week, you might have heard about Google Wave. It's Goog's soon-to-come (as in sometime this year) product that combines features of e-mail, messaging, collaboration and content management into one kind of super platform.

It's being built with a whole set of APIs designed not only to make it easy to create features within it but also to integrate it into other content, such as blogs and Web sites.

If you are in journalism, you need to pay attention to this -- heck, if for nothing more than the contextually smart spell check (about 45 minutes into the video). But consider a breaking news situation, say the plane that was forced to land in the Hudson River. The tech and journalism world was all a-twitter about Twitter and how it allowed eyewitnesses to post photos well ahead of mainstream media.

Imagine what happens if a collaborative group witnessing such an event has a tool as powerful as Wave. (One thing unclear to me is how a "wave" might be made generally public if you were not publishing to another site, but I suspect I just overlooked that.)

Here's Jeff Jarvis' take on it. Meanwhile, make time to look at the hour and 20-minute video.

Microsoft, meanwhile, has come out with its latest search-engine foray, Bing. I tried it for a bit tonight, and it is a worthy tool to add to the kit. I still think Google gives me more relevant results faster, but Bing gave me some results on my name, for instance, that I'd forgotten about and almost never see that high up (first five pages) in Google. The contextual box that comes up when you mouse over a link also is nice.

I have to give it more of a try. But my suggestion is to start playing with it.

A few comforting words for editors - from Google

Maybe this will help ease the pain flowing -- especially -- through the editing ranks of newsrooms lately.

No less than Google says editors are -- wait for it -- more important than ever!

It reads a little bit like Google saying, please, save us from ourselves. From a gathering in Colombia via the World Editors Forum:

The lesson behind the examples was that editors need to fact-check more than ever because once information is published, it is immediately spread all over the world by Googlebots and other software. Editors need to make sure that "informing as quickly as possible is not the same as misinforming."

Google CEO - dismayed over lack of depth reporting

Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently said he's worried about the state of investigative reporting in this country. Here's the video that will probably bring snickers -- or worse -- from those who think Goog is a large part of the problem.

However, it's just more of the same - "we have to find a business model" to fund good journalism. How can we move beyond that to actually finding one?

(Schmidt also wasn't particularly fond of the Atlantic article "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?" He also talks about new technology to detect illegally uploaded content and then give the content creator some choices on what to do. One of those is to put a wrapper around the offending stuff telling people that if they like it, here are some other things you can do (I assume directing them to the real artist's site where some money can be made ...)

More useful tools

Add to your list of useful sites Julian Sher's Journalismnet.com.

Sher does a good job of tracking down online tools to help you do better research.

One he's featuring this week is Google Sites, which, I admit, I haven't seen before and don't see in Goog's expanded list of resources. But it looks like a good way to create a quick Web site for sharing that has controls for who can view and edit.

And if you're into journalism social networks, another one has opened, The Modern Journalist, started by Brad King out of the Cincinnati area who is writing a book on what modern news organizations should look like.

If the Internet scares you, try this

For a lot of journalists (and journalism students), the Internet is still a big scary place with things like XML, PHP, AJAX, XHTML and lots of other low-flying abbreviations.

Oh sure, they know how to Google and maybe use some databases online. But lurking out there is "geekdom" -- you know, that mystical land where they can make really cool stuff happen on a Web page and you just know that that's the skills stuff they're going to be looking for and I can't learn all this coding and ...

Slow down, Bunky. As many have said, you won't necessarily have to be a code jockey to be a journalist. But it will be useful to know the sorts of things that can be done and the effort and resources needed to do them.

Into the picture comes Zac Echola, whose blog I have started reading recently and who has some very down-to-earth thoughts on all of this. In catching up on some of his posts, I found two very good ones I'd point you to.

• First is his "Code on deadline (or how I learned to program without actually doing any programming." His point is that there are a ton of free services out there that, when cobbled together, provide much of the same functionality a raw code would.
• Second is the example he posted later, "Simple and free online journalism project to do in 45 minutes"
  in which he shows you how to harness some of these services - Google reader, Feedburner and Twitter -- to land weather alerts on your home page.
  

Now you may never have to put a weather alert on a page or parse a feed and extract -- and then display - another piece for information. You might never need a map with your story. And you probably wouldn't be asked to draw it and save it and get it online, even if it was needed. But wouldn't it be cool to know a quick and dirty way to do it, to know what those "Web" folks are talking about when they discuss some of what they're about to do -- to your story?

And even if you don't have mad programming skills, you still are going to have to be able, in the future, to discuss with others in the newsroom the online possibilities, so it doesn't hurt to know the jargon and a little bit how to do it quick and dirty.

This is what I'm trying to produce -- young reporters and editors who know enough at least to converse intelligently in a multimedia newsroom. Echola shows that it's pretty easy to do in this Web 2.0 world where the operative word is "share."

AP and Google

It had to happen. AP and other wire services eventually had to hook up with Google News as they announced they would Friday. They need the increased revenue and know that chances of getting it from the beleaguered newspaper business are about nil.

One take on this is that it will put some big hurt on other publishers' sites to which Google now sends traffic to look at wire service stories. The official spin, on the other hand, is that it will enable those other sites' local news copy to get better placement on Google now that all these duplicate links won't show up pointing to the same wire-service story on multiple sites. And, of course, Yahoo has taken AP for years without the sky falling in.

From the AP story:

Under its new approach, Google reasons readers won't have to pore through search results listing the same story posted on different sites. That should in turn make it easier to discover other news stories at other Web sites that might previously have been buried, said Josh Cohen, the business product manager for Google News.

"This may result in certain publishers losing traffic for their news wire stories, but it will allow more room for their original content," Cohen said.

Vlae Kershner, news director for the San Francisco Chronicle's Web site, backed up that theory, saying Google News mostly refers readers interested in the newspaper's staff-written stories. "This is going to have a very minimal impact on our traffic," he said.

Referrals from Google News accounted for 2.2 percent of the traffic at newspaper Web sites during the week ending Aug. 25, according to the research firm Hitwise.

I tend to think there's some validity in this, but it's going to irritate some publishers for sure. If I were one of them, why wouldn't I consider dropping the wire service from my site? Which then poses an interesting question for AP Video. If publishers drop the words, can the video stand on its own on those Web sites? Will those newsrooms even want it to? (My prediction -- yes, because it's an easy, cheap way for a lot of newsrooms to make it seem like they are "doing" video.)

Bottom line: Is there any way AP cannot cut off its nose to spite its face? It's getting harder for the world's largest news service to escape the reality that once it sells its national and international wire to a couple of Web wholesalers, no one else really needs it.

The state and local wires are a different matter. But it takes a lot of resources to keep state bureaus properly staffed and generating new material. Bureaus still rely heavily on "shared" news from members (newspapers and broadcasters, mostly). But as papers go to the Web quickly and directly -- or as in South Carolina when a chain like McClatchy starts sharing among all the papers it owns in the state, displacing AP copy -- why will their stories need to be "shared" through AP?

Until publishers figure out easier ways to license their material, AP serves as a sanitizing service for those items, providing copy to print members without the hassle of their having to negotiate multiple license agreements. But as newspaper ad revenues keep dropping sharply, space for wire copy diminishes (or the paper becomes so wire-laden that the readership can be affected) and the need for fresh, enterprised copy becomes more acute. But then AP runs up against the cost issues its "news cooperative" structure has ameliorated all these years.

It's a tough juggling act.
-----
Update and additional thoughts

I forgot in the original post to put this in the larger context -- that of AP's overall moves away from being a news cooperative. Last January, for instance, was the word that AP would supply news to Nintendo's Wii game system.

At the time, an editor asked what do you do when your supplier becomes your competitor. And I responded that I didn't think AP saw it as competition, but that it essentially had written newspapers off as a viable channel to reach that market segment. I think that is more evident with this

But this also needs to be seen in context of a potentially greater shift. The AP is now a "nonprofit" news cooperative. The "alternative revenues," as AP liked to call them, from deals like this used to be used primarily to keep yearly increases in members' assessments down to the low single digits in most cases. But now these alternative revenues are starting to become critical to the AP's overall operating ability. Though traditional media continue to make up the vast source of AP's revenue, how receptive do we expect they will be to price increases, even just to match inflation, when the word continues to be that ad revenue is dropping and profits are following suit?

For now, AP is contracting internally through moves such as consolidating several state bureaus under one bureau chief (where before each had its own COB). I understand some positions are going unfilled a lot longer than before, too.

But at some point, AP is going to have to examine the efficacy of continuing as a nonprofit cooperative. I've been told that the idea already has been kicked around with some seriousness (what I don't know is whether it was a bunch of execs just having a bull session or seriously starting to look at the alternatives). But if the current trajectories in the news business hold, I expect that at some point soon it will be on the table -- likely under current CEO Tom Curley, but definitely under his successor.

The key will be the state reports and the photo report. AP faces a dichotomy: Its national and international news is largely a commodity now, and one that it self-produces so that if it sells it to Google or Yahoo or whatever fewer toes are stepped on (leaving out, for the moment, the smaller percentage of stories picked up daily from the state wires and reworked by New York for the national and international lines).

Its state reports retain a different kind of value, and to be economically viable in most states (with relatively small state bureau staffs) they require the news sharing from members that comes with being a cooperative. But that limits how those can be sold. Sell those to Yahoo or Google and you make lots of enemies because you have effectively cut some of the guts out of the local papers. The news sharing will largely stop (although under established legal principles the AP probably won't be prohibited from reporting that xxx or yyy paper said this and that on its Web site or in the latest edition).

The tipping point will come when AP decides it can effectively cover the state and regional stuff with existing staffs and without the need for news sharing. It would have to produce a report that it can sell to the Googles of the world but that still provides a modicum of content that retains some attractiveness for the local print and broadcast outlets, which do rely on AP to help keep their overall costs down. Of course, that then makes it more attractive for those local news outlets to set up their own sharing arrangements.

Its photos probably can be split off into a stand-alone service in today's multimedia environment. Whether that generates enough revenue on its own to support a decent-size photo corps, and keeping in mind that a fair amount of photos also are shared from members, remains problematic.

Howard Weaver, McClatchy's VP of news, gives some support to my overall assessment with his blog post on the AP's move.

That will cost us a little traffic – but not much, and not very valuable. That kind of random, out-of-market traffic in search of generic wire news isn't at the heart of what we do.

I'm not yet fully informed about this – and I do fault the AP for failure to communicate with us adequately about the deal. ...

AP doesn't sell Google its "state wire" with local news that originates from our papers, so that traffic isn't affected. Neither is organic search at google.com.

But a comment to that post from Andy Perdue, interactive media director at the Tri-City Herald in Kennewick, Wash., also has some truth -- and a warning -- to it:

AP seems to conveniently forget that it was founded by newspapers and many of its sources of information are those same newspapers.

The only thing that keeps many newspapers from dropping AP is the photo service. We can get our regional news from most other papers and national news from any of the other half-dozen wire services to which we subscribe. The majority of news we print is local. What we can't quite replicate is the photography.

AP has strayed far from its newspaper roots. The more it pulls crap like this, the less I respect it. At some point, respect does pay the bills.

Further update Sept. 5

Alan Mutter has one of his usual insightful posts on the whole thing, extending the discussion to consider whether this will hasten the death of already-flagging banner ads.

And Tim McGuire, former senior vice president and publisher at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, has some sharp words for AP (and a look from the "other" side of AP's standard line on being a news cooperative). Along with calling AP's state reports "shadows of what they once were" is this:

Let’s start with the basic fact of life that was force-fed to me by countless AP bureau chiefs in the sober confines of my office and the not-so-sober late afternoon meetings in the pub: “Hey, we’re in this together. You own us! These rate increases aren’t really rate increases, they’re your part of the partnership fee!”

That AP-as-cooperative stuff was part of the AP mantra from the time the bureau chief stepped out of his car until the time he called to yell at you about your failure to file a dandy photo the AP wanted to distribute to your competition. You “owed” AP the big rate increase and you “owed” AP that news scoop, or the great photo because we were all one big happy family.

I think there’s some domestic abuse going on here.