The Associated Press has laid out a plan to put news behind a pay wall.
The confidential plan was not for distribution but was mentioned at the Nieman Lab and broadcast widely through Romenesko.
The document pointed to the success of the Wikipedia model – “standing, authoritative pages.”
The document fails to mention or acknowledge that Wikipedia is crowdsourced information, updated and maintained by readers who volunteer to participate. Part of the appeal is that it is updated constantly and very accurate. But it also hundreds of thousands of in-depth entries on nearly every topic, no matter how new or arcane. The provides an unlimited audience instead of just those courted by mass media mentality – see the The Long Tail or Clay Shirky.
The document also left out that:
• There is no advertising on Wikipedia.
• Wikipedia has only a few dozen paid employees.
• Wikipedia does not charge to read its content.
Many of the flimsiest newspaper archive (except the New York Times) charges to see its archives.
“AP simply can’t continue to provide the same quality of golabal news coverage under the current rules, where second hand news gets most of the eyeballs.”
The AP wants to be like Wikipedia Then they point out Wikipedia garnered only 6.8 percent of the audience who searched “Michael Jackson” in the month after his death. 6.8 percent made Wikipedia the second largest beneficiary of traffic?, slightly behind only Google News (7.1%). AP and Google already have a partnership.
The piece never gets into the fact that the market for news is so diluted that it seems impossible to discern the producers from the users. Will AP applaud bloggers for pointing people to news sites or will AP seek to punish bloggers for reprinting information?