14 DAY TRIAL // Much of the old guard news and publishing industry has been critical of the Internet, bloggers, search engines, news aggregators and pretty much anyone else they can point their finger at for, allegedly, creating the financial problems most of those organizations find themselves in. Looking at their own organization and figuring what the problems are and how to solve them is not that high on their agenda. One of the more vocal critics, apart from News Corp., has been the Associated Press (AP). Recently Google stopped adding new AP stories to Google News, but it looks like Yahoo may be faring better in its negotiations, as the WSJ reports (subscription required).
Yahoo and AP are apparently close to a deal, sources say to the WSJ, but the terms are much more favorable for AP than any previous ones. With the deal in its current form, and if AP gets its way, Yahoo will have a lot more limitations and restrictions on the stories themselves and will also have to pay more for the licensing.
The deal is said to be weeks away from signing and it might change the way news organizations work with large news online aggregators and portals like Google and Yahoo. The AP has long been pushing for separating news stories into several tiers. This way breaking news would be available exclusively for certain sites, which pay more, for a window of time.
The idea is that this will generate more revenue for the AP, and news sources would be interested in having an exclusive story even if for a short period of time. In practice, it is unlikely to work, once a story hits the web, there's no stopping its spread and creating artificial barriers just means that those who would pay the AP the regular fees, and not for the exclusive, would be the only ones without the story while the rest of the Internet, which would presumably pay nothing, will run the story anyway.
Google seems less likely to budge from its position and negotiations with the AP may be going a lot worse judging by the signs. The company has a licensing deal with AP, set to expire at the end of this month, in which Google paid the news organization to host its stories on the Google News site. Since late December though, no new AP stories have been added to the site with no real explanation from Google. Stories get regularly pulled after 30 days from the site and it looks like Google wants to make sure that there isn't any more AP content starting next month on the site, in case the negotiations turn out to be fruitless.