UPDATE: A follow-up to this post is here

It is strictly 'inside baseball' stuff but in their blogs Jeff Jarvis and Matthew Ingram picked up on our recent experiences with the Google News / AP partnership.

It started with some comments left elsewhere on Matthew's blog regarding the way Google News now gives priority to AP wire stories over the same stories on newspaper Web sites.

With the commoditization of news - it is actually somewhat helpful to minimize the display of the 1,453 occurences of the exact same AP story across every newspaper.com in the country. Basically, if you have seen one you have seen them all.  Google and AP figure that to be the case, so the Google hosted version of the AP story is the one they will now present first.

Curiously though - Google highlights this effort as Original stories, from the source which is curious since many some* AP stories are pick-ups from member newspapers.

I applaud the effort to streamline usability here - but to create a truly 'original source'  experience Google and AP need to figure out how to give credit (and links) back to the ACTUAL originating source, when there is one.

As a proposal - AP should embed an 'original source URL' in their article metadata. Google nows pays for and receives the AP feed - and could then parse that field, feed it into their algorithims and give the actual original source a higher ranking in Google News.

In the case of many stories this would provide the reader with access to the most recent updates, local forums, comments, multimedia and other related assets, and maybe even an archive of related articles all on the relevant newspaper.com itself.

That would be a win for Google's users, a win for local newspaper journalism and would help keep AP from the wrath of disintermediation. 

* I am reminded in an email that most of AP's articles, especially on the national wire are written by AP staffers. My comments here are really directed mostly at the need to reform the system on the state/regional wires to provide more "Google" value to newspapers doing original local reporting.