A confidential memo leaked from the Associated Press, explains a 3 part plan to control news they produce, to stop websites, blogs, Twitter, and anyone else from ‘scraping’ the content and using it without their permission.
While I think they will have a tough fight on their hands and I doubt their plan will be acceptable today, the analysis provided in the confidential memo is interesting. Specifically, I like the analysis of how the news of Michael Jackson’s death propagated and how Wikipedia, Google, and Twitter where the main benefactors of the traffic.
Michael Jackson died suddenly on June 25, and within 30 minutes, the news absorbed 25 percent of all web traffic. Online news sites logged an astounding 4.2 million visitors a minute, according to the delivery network Akamai. Two of the biggest beneficiaries of that traffic bonanza were Twitter and Wikipedia, a couple of digital natives that would have been viewed as very unlikely news competitors even a few months ago. Indeed, a new pattern of consumption was validated in the confusing minutes that followed the first reports of Jacko's death: Users shared; they searched and they clicked on Wikipedia. In the course of only a few hours on the first day of the story, the Michael Jackson page on Wikipedia received 1.8 million visits. By Friday, the total reached 5 million visits. For those with long Internet memories, the new routine of Twitter-to-Google-to-Wikipedia contrasts sharply with the behavior of users in August of 1997, when millions loaded and reloaded bookmarked news sites to get updates on the death of Princess Diana, another celebrity icon of similar magnitude.
I have to agree with their behavioural analysis of consumers of news. I myself saw a tweet on my PDA about the death of Michael Jackson. Next, I searched Twitter and clicked on the links that made sense to click on. Twitter is my main source of news. From Twitter, I can decide what news tweets if any I am interested in. If I am interested, I can investigate further via other tweets, links and/or Google.
The memo goes on to explain their 3 step approach to regaining control of the news from consumers. AP did a press release on their “News Registry” to help “protect content” which is one of the steps in the memo. However, the confidential memo is much more revealing and ‘colourful’ if you are interested.
