A couple of bloggers have gotten their panties in a bunch because the Associated Press, a coop that offers original reporting to its 1,500 member newspapers and syndicates to other outlets, is asking that they go a little easier on the copy-paste. TechCrunch's Michael Arrington is having none of it!
As we reported last week, the Associated Press sent a copyright complaint to a harmless little left-wing news aggregating site demanding they remove posts that featured "39 to 79 words" of their precious, precious copy. Over the weekend, after outrage from various blogs, they retreated. But they're not giving up! Blogs will bow to them! They will set standards, and blogs will naturally decide to follow these standards on their own accord, because that's how bloggers act!
This is troubling! The Associated Press has filed 7 Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown requests against a site called Drudge Retort (unaffiliated with Matt Drudge). The site is a largely user-generated blog that features headlines, excerpts from news articles, links, and discussion. The AP says this practice is a violation of their intellectual property. Some call it blogging! The AP's lawyer is having none of that:
Since the LA Times earlier this week floated reports that Paul Newman is suffering from lung cancer, the only developing news about the actor's condition is that no one will confirm it. With Newman's rep on one hand saying he is "doing nicely" and old pal A.E. Hotchner on the other acknowledging only "cancer of some sort" (alluding a few breaths later to previous surgery "in the lung area"), the AP today issued a statement saying it stands by its original report on Newman's condition.
Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's unborn twins are worshiped by the entertainment press as a sort of double celebrity messiah. Bidding for exclusive first pictures has reportedly reached $15 million and is poised to rise further. So it was with no small measure of elation Friday that Entertainment Tonight delivered news that the twins had just been born in the south of France, a big scoop. But People and Us Weekly soon reported denials from reps for the couple. Brad Pitt attended a Grand Prix event across the border in Italy, which would be an odd decision for a new father. The celebrified Associated Press, which obtained a denial from Pitt's manager, asked, "Was Entertainment Tonight punk'd?" Maybe not. Maybe it is the victim of a MASSIVE ANGELINA JOLIE CONSPIRACY.
Barring legal challenges, gay couples can begin marrying in California starting June 17. Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi will eventually wed, but the wire services needed some examples of couples getting into the spirit now, or maybe some archive stuff from the gay marriages four years ago in San Francisco. Reuters surfaced the picture on the left; the Associated Press the one on the right. As Daniel Radosh notes, "Ninety thousand lesbians in California, and the AP just happened to find the professional belly dancer. That's what I call a nose for news." Maybe there was some smart thinking behind the AP's strange new celebrity news division; the wire service has already learned to think like the paparazzi. [Radosh]
Good news for budding gossip reporters, or writers desperate enough to pretend Britney Spears rehashes are their life's ambition: some media organizations are still hiring.
We're stocking up on bottled water and canned goods around Defamer HQ today, where even our shameless pop-culture pathologies can't process devastating reports that the venerable Associated Press is launching a standalone entertainment news organization. The equally tormented Nikki Finke, whose giddiness at yesterday's fall of PageSix.com was mitigated only slightly by the firings it would require, crashed back to Earth today with an internal memo clearly foreshadowing — via a Q&A with new "Director of Entertainment Content" Daniel Becker — the violent demise of newsgathering as we know it:
The Associated Press is planning to hire 21 people in Los Angeles, New York and London to cover celebrity news for the wire service's new entertainment group. An AP exec admitted in an internal memo, obtained by Hollywood rabble rouser Nikki Finke, that the move is basically a ploy for cash, but insisted the AP will distinguish itself from rabble like TMZ and OK! by verifying or disproving rumors. It's hard to see how the wire will pull that off: Hollywood publicists are notorious liars, the stars themselves are impossible to reach and sources who actually know what they're talking about tend to ask for a monetary payoff if they speak at all. But the AP will try, not so valiantly, because there are hundreds of millions of dollars to be made. Here is AP lifer Daniel Becker, left, talking about raking in celebrity news bucks out of one side of his mouth and spouting platitudes about journalistic integrity out of the other:
Okay, we've had just about enough of AP entertainment editor Jesse Washington, who guarantees in the above video to give you "good bang for your buck" if you pass on exclusive information to the wire service. You remember Washington, right? "If Britney passed away, it’s easily one of the biggest stories in a long time," he told US when explaining why the AP had Britney Spears' obit ready. "If we wait an hour to have a really good obituary for someone like Heath Ledger, we're totally out of the game. And that’s not a place that I ever want to be," he said on NPR this weekend. We've got no problem with the AP canning Britney's obit (we wouldn't want them to be caught off guard like they were with Ledger's.) But this guy could use a handler. Or a muzzle, maybe? It's one thing to respond to press queries with a comment offering explanation. But Washington's remarks are a tetch tone-deaf. Or are they?
The Associated Press says Britney Spears is now "a big deal", writes Brian Stelter, the New York Times' wunderkind media reporter. An interesting story, but strangely familiar. Because it was reported on "various media blogs" a full six days ago. 22-year-old Stelter came to the notice of the Times because of his obsessive and to-the-minute reporting on the one-man blog he started as a hobby, the excellent TV Newser. Shame to see his journalistic metabolism slow so quickly.
The Associated Press is apologizing for running a story about Paris Hilton in which our young heroine reportedly championed the rights of alcoholic elephants in India. Hilton did not, in fact, tell reporters, "The elephants get drunk all the time. It is becoming really dangerous. We need to stop making alcohol available to them." She was, however, quoted in Page Six today as saying that "There are no guys at this party - or in LA in general. New York has so much better guys," which in essence is about the same thing.
The Associated Press has sued Moreover Technologies, an early news aggregator. Moreover, owned by VeriSign, provides news coverage from a wide variety of sources to subscribers that it finds on websites, including AP wire stories. AP's complaint is that Moreover is "scraping," or copying, the full text of wire stories and sending them to subscribers without paying for them. AP's lawyers argue that this is far outside the realm of fair use. After Moreover ignored a cease-and-desist letter, AP decided to sue. An interesting case, to be sure, but one that's widely misunderstood by quick-on-the-draw bloggers.
After an exhausting seven months of polling, MTV and the Associated Press have finished a survey of America's youth. (Those aged 13-24, at least.) Turns out, kids are happy! Especially white kids, who apparently love their parents, believe in God, want to make gobs of money, and think technology "makes people happier." Half of them never turn off their cell phones. Just wait until you're WORKING with these freaks. You'll be the unhappy one! (P.S. Did you know MTV has "an esteemed research pedigree"? Yeah, us neither.) [MTV]
As we speak, the A.P. is being evacuated for a suspicious package — it's very exciting.
The Associated Press runs a summary of the Reuters Photoshop teacup-tempest, re-noting that photog Adnan Hajj blames his bad brushwork on an attempt to remove "dust marks" under "bad lighting conditions." (Reuters has since embarked on an ass-covering campaign that includes a short discourse on the acceptable uses of Photoshop.) On the AP side of the fence, another photographer's "careless" use of Photoshop's cloning tool to compensate for a "dirty sensor" cloned an extra set of hands onto an Alaskan oil pipeline worker. The AP pulled that photo Monday; of course, we'd love a copy if anyone still has it on file. But really, we also love how WRAL's layout of the AP story comes complete with the graphic at right, where the Reuters logo gets the proprietary credit of "AP Image." Use of the Reuters logo is forbidden without the express written permission of the Associated Press.
