More choice or fewer clicks?
Jinfo Blog

18th October 2007

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Better News for Less is the title of a white paper currently available for download from real time news provider Moreover http://w.moreover.com/ - something of an irony, this, as Moreover is currently facing legal action from Associated Press, which alleges that it is accessing and electronically publishing AP’s proprietary news reports without permission. ‘Unlike traditional content syndicators that resell proprietary information, Moreover's sophisticated technology continually scours the Internet to capture and distribute breaking news and business information from thousands of qualified, handpicked sources,’ Moreover claims. However this cuts no ice with AP. ‘The Associated Press spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year... providing original coverage of vital breaking news that cannot be obtained anywhere else,’ said AP’s Chief Executive Tom Curley. ‘When someone uses our content without our permission, they are free riding on our newsgathering.’ http://www.ap.org/pages/about/pressreleases/pr_100907a.html According to Nancy Gohring of technology news provider IDG, http://digbig.com/4ttdb the case has similarities to the one which reportedly induced Google News to change recently from a link-based to a hosted service. Although Google still doesn’t believe it needs a licence to reproduce a snippet of the original story and link direct to it, Ms Gohring reports that it decided to go down the licensing route following legal action from another global news wire, Agence France Presse. Should information managers and their end users care, so long as the news keeps coming in? Indeed they should. Firstly there’s the issue of provenance. If you pick up a story that’s been reproduced by a third party, it’s only prudent to trace it back to its original source to ensure that it’s accurate and complete. Example: I picked up the Nancy Gohring article on Yahoo News via an RSS feed from Content Blogger; I tracked it back to the PC World website from which Yahoo had sourced it, and then checked on the relationship between PC World and IDG News as a final safeguard. That’s a lot of clicks to confirm the integrity of one story – but it’s a necessary part of being a responsible infopro with a reputation to maintain. Better, perhaps, to take the Google News route http://web.vivavip.com/forum/LiveWire/read.php?i=477 with guaranteed access to the story in its original form, cutting out all the other versions? But on the other hand, cutting out all the intermediate stages risks concentrating content in fewer hands – something that is currently exercising the European Commission, which is investigating the Thomson Reuters deal for possible adverse effects on the financial information sector. http://digbig.com/4ttda It also raises questions about the 2.0 culture of actively encouraging comment on original reports – comment that can sometimes add value by assessing a report’s implications for a particular community. So – more choice or fewer clicks?

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