Is Google News the enemy, or is the Associated Press the enemy?

To be fair, news organizations are handing their content over to AP, which for years now has been completely fine with also directly competing with those news organizations and handing those stories over to the competition.

Google News is still useful for generating traffic to newspaper.coms, so long as Google links to the original story, not the AP version of the same story.

Lucas, Two questions for you. First, why was the AP, whose Board consists of a who's who of its member organizations and which is fully owned by its members, allowed to make this deal with Google? Second, why aren't AP members doing something about it? (Steve Boriss, The Future of News)

Maybe when Google starts making money off the AP stories, Google will turn around and put money into journalism, one way or another, to fund the creation of the stories that AP is providing.

Google will not be hiring journalists. But Google needs to keep journalism afloat.

AP stories come from members all over the place. Who pays whom, and how? Google's money isn't dirty. If money from Google helps keep reporters out on the beat, that's good for journalism overall.

I also support ending the practice of sending stories to the Associated Press.

The AP once actually linked newspapers together in an effort to share. But the AP is more useful now as a service for sending its own national and international content to newspapers and Web sites that need it.

It no longer makes sense to pretend we live in a world in which newspapers can share their content. We all compete online. Before, we didn't.

Why should we let the AP sell our content to competitors such as Google News and Yahoo? Really, that's a legitimate question, why?

I clicked over here to make the same point that others are making - It's not Google that's the devil in this case, but AP. The AP got its start in the 1800s as a "cooperative," as Lucas noted. Now, it's in direct competition with its member newspapers in many ways.

I'm a huge believer that this deal can be great for newspapers and bad for national news orgs.

- It devalues AP content for newspapers, which needs to happen. Those generic AP stories are everywhere and are yesterdays news in the morning paper.

- It forces newspapers to put their local and unique content out front even more.

- When members stop sending stuff to AP, there won't be much local news on the wire for Google and Yahoo. The AP will exist to cover politics, wars, etc.

The other option is for AP and its members to enter an ad revenue sharing plan with Google for member stories. That could work because Google knows how to do ad targeting. Newspapers have a ways to go there...

I'm surprised this happened, but echo concerns that the devil here may be AP. Or more fairly, that AP may have outlasted its usefulness to members.

Five years ago, it was always a thrill for me to get a story picked up by AP. It got my work widely published. And AP has always been good about giving credit to the original newspaper (i.e. Sen. Whuzit told The News Star Gazetribune "Screw the poor"), so it ensured kudos for those who broke the news.

But a lot has happened since then. Now, I'd much rather have a link to my story search high in Google and bring traffic to my newspaper's site, or even better, get a link on a popular blog. That does everything AP used to do, and provides more page views and unique users, providing a direct financial benefit.

So what does AP do now? I get a story picked up. It gets published in the Houston Chronicle, which normally generates more traffic than my paper only for its coverage area, and ends up pushing me down in Google listings so a reader can go to chron.com and learn my paper broke the story but never visit our site.

That was never a big deal in the all-print age, when a Texas reader would have no opportunity to read the original article in The News-Press. But now, when that reader could get directed to my original article as easily as a reprint, it's almost infuriating.

Google provides everything AP used to but does so in an Internet-appropriate way. Maybe when AP launched its own Internet content, it should have thought of making a central hub with hyperlinks to original articles rather than recycling our words and slapping (AP) on the top. But it didn't. And now someone has found a better model.

Tough break for AP. Not so tough for news sites.