Matthew Ingram posts a comment from an AP staffer regarding the AP/Google partnership:

“AP’s state wires, which include member content, are not licensed to Google and other online aggregators.

As a result, only a tiny fraction of the national and international stories sold by AP to aggregators originated with members of the cooperative – typically scoops credited to the members.

Except for this tiny fraction, the stories sold to Google and others are original AP reports by agency staffers.”

I have no objection to the AP/Google deal at all but I think AP's explanation misses on a couple points.

1) 'Credit' is an outdated concept in the digital realm. Giving credit is one thing - linking to the original source is the real thing.

2) Only a tiny fraction of member stories make the national wire - but local newspapers are crowded out of the Google news listings every day by regional/national media.coms that subscribe to and do publish the AP state wires.

The Google/AP partnership is not 'the' problem. But, what it does is highlight and exacerbate a problem newspapers have been facing in regard to Google News for years now. It also creates the opportunity for a solution to our concerns.

Case in point - stories that are picked up for the state/region wire quickly appear on our competitor's Web sites, sometimes within an hour of our original posting. Unfortunately, when Boston.com (to pick an example) publishes an AP pick-up of one of our stories, Google inevitably gives their copy (and others) higher prominence in Google News. So an hour after we break a story, someone else is getting the traffic for it.

In the past, we have accepted this as a cost of doing business. However, now that AP and Google have a business relationship and have begun developing products I think member papers have the responsibility to ask "how does this benefit us?"

In my opinion, a benefit would be as I suggested in my blog post yesterday: AP should provide identifying metadata (possibly a URL) for member articles that are moved on the state or national wires. Google could then match the AP version of the story with the original version on the member newspaper.com. When presenting these stories within Google News the original newspaper.com story would receive greater prominence than the other 1,400 versions of the AP article on the Web.

Everybody wins this way. member papers get traffic for the stories they originate. AP & Google get to profit from AP-generated staff stories and readers get to surf the news needless duplication free.