Asia-Pacific

AP to form news group to make money from mobile

(Agencies)
Updated: 2010-10-19 09:27

AUSTIN, Texas - The Associated Press is overseeing the creation of an organization to help newspapers and broadcasters make more money as more people get their news from mobile phones and other wireless devices.

The ambitious project announced Monday signals that the AP, a 164-year-old news cooperative, hopes to play a leadership role as long-established media try to reverse several years of decline brought on by their inability to capitalize on the Internet.

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AP CEO Tom Curley said the company is creating a digital-rights clearinghouse that should help the news media protect their content and generate more revenue as technology hatches new channels for distributing the news they produce.

"We've stood by while others invent creative, new uses for our news and reap most of the benefit," Curley said Monday in a speech before the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association in Austin.

But the recent shift to so-called smart phones and tablet-style computers is giving the media a chance for what Ken Doctor, a newspaper industry analyst, has described as a "digital do-over."

"The digital marketplace is on the cusp of an even bigger phase of growth on new platforms and devices," Curley said. "We have arrived at a moment of significant opportunity."

In creating the clearinghouse, the AP is drawing upon research that began in 2007 to establish an enforcement and payment system loosely modeled after the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. ASCAP collects and distributes royalties for more than 390,000 songwriters and others involved in the creation of music.

The news clearinghouse would try to negotiate licensing deals for stories, photos and video produced by participating news organizations, including the AP. News organizations would still produce and own content made available to the clearinghouse. Any payments would go to them, after subtracting administrative fees expected to be 20 percent at first. Curley didn't provide many specifics in his speech, including who the target customers of such content are.

The clearinghouse also intends to fight piracy by relying on a tracking system, called a "news registry," that the AP began developing more than a year ago.

Besides detecting unauthorized use of content, the registry's tagging system can provide insights about the people who are viewing content or the frequency with which a specific company or expert is mentioned in news coverage. That information conceivably could be used to show ads to people who are most likely to be interested in certain products and services or sold to companies trying to understand how they are perceived.

In hopes of avoiding antitrust issues, the AP is setting up the clearinghouse as an independent organization. An executive hasn't been appointed to run it yet. It could be in operation by the end of the year.

The AP believes that much of the media will be clamoring to join, based on the industry's response to its news registry. Since it moved out of its test phase in July, more than 1,000 newspapers have either joined or indicated they will. The registry will remain a part of the news cooperative.