AP's Sense of Humor Is as Lame as Its Approach to Digital Content. Just Pay Woot the $17.50.
If you're an old media company and your policy for how your content is shared on the Internet is so dumb that you can't even follow it, it's time to change policies. That's the key takeaway from a hilarious, if also pitiful, kerfuffle that started yesterday between the discount-a-day site Woot and the Associated Press, since the AP violated its own policy regarding use of other people's content in covering Woot's acqusition late last week by Amazon (allegedly for a cool $110 million).
In a nutshell, the AP used quotes from Woot CEO Matt Rutledge that were posted on the company blog as part of its coverage. This caused the Woot-sters -- who are not lacking for a sense of humor -- to calculate that, using the AP's formula, the AP owes Woot $17.50. So what do the headphones pictured above have to do with it? News of the alleged debt was worked into yesterday's Woot, a sweet deal on two sets of Sennheiser headphones. Woot said that if the AP would just buy the headphones, the whole thing would be forgotten.
As is probably obvious -- if you've followed the AP lately -- the AP responded to Woot's offer showing the paucity of humor that has become as much a trademark of the organization as its unworkable ideas on how to monetize its digital content. At this point, the whole thing becomes very convoluted -- though you can follow it over at TechCrunch -- but suffice to say that AP spokesperson Paul Colford seems to think it's OK that the AP took its quote from Woot's blog -- because the AP also conducted an interview with Woot's CEO, of which it used very little. Using that logic, if I had interviewed someone for a blog post that the AP had also written a story about, I should be able to quote freely -- in every sense of the word -- from the AP's coverage of the same story.
But the more serious issue here is that among the things the AP hasn't come to terms with is how the online world has democratized content. It probably doesn't equate the Woot corporate blog with the kind of content it produces -- but there's no rule which says that reportage is real content, while the rest is not. The true difference between the AP and Woot's approach to content is that the AP is struggling to keep its business afloat. And, since its business depends on content, it needs to extract money from it. Woot creates lots of content too, but making money off of it isn't at issue.
Previous coverage of the AP at BNET Media: