• After hearing from Rich Pearson of Attrib­u­tor, we think it’s at least fair to artic­u­late what we think a content-licensing agree­ment should be like for bloggers. Because it seems like, while Attrib­u­tor has a good point (and is appar­ently follow­ing a don’t-be-evil pathos), their business model comes across almost as a debt-collector role regard­ing the copyright of content. As far as content-charging goes, what we’d like to see is a store­front approach as a way to add value to the propo­si­tion. A bit of explanation:

How newspa­pers get wire content:

• This is AP Exchange. We have access to this resource due to the fact that we have a day job. We don’t use it (or link to any AP content, prefer­ably) on Short­Form­Blog because recent state­ments from the wire service have raised a lot of red flags for us about the usage of its content on blogs. Anyway, your mom-and-pop bloggers don’t have (and may not need) access to something this elabo­rate, but there are things that many bloggers could really use – budgets of upcom­ing stories (allow­ing for planning, not reaction), high-resolution photos, and graph­ics in vector format which can be easily reworked. Unfor­tu­nately, it requires a huge contract and newspa­pers have to give years-in-advance notices if they choose to quit the wire service. Most blogs aren’t that big – unless you’re HuffPo, you can’t afford it.

Business model points of comparison:

• » Photo­shop Elements: Not every­one needs the full version of Photo­shop, an incred­i­bly complex product with a lot of knobs to twiddle. So Adobe created Photo­shop Elements, which offers many of the features at a cheaper price. Simpler, cheaper – that’s what we’d suggest.
• » Lala/Spotify: iTunes isn’t exactly the model we’d suggest for this. An all-you-can-eat model like Spotify is nice, while an ultra-cheap micro­pay­ment distri­b­u­tion model like Lala might be ideal. Many news stories don’t have a ton of currency beyond the first day.
• » Typekit: Typekit, which is trying to do something similar for typog­ra­phy, has a very polished inter­face on the developer’s end which makes it incred­i­bly easy to find the right font to use. Their use of javascript is a little annoy­ing, but ultimately, it strikes a good balance between making rights-holders happy and giving Web site owners more options.

What we’d like to see:

• one We think bloggers need an inter­face for content-gathering on a wire service, something that they could use as a resource just like Google News and Twitter.
• two We think Automat­tic or Six Apart (or Publish2, even), which already have signif­i­cant ties to the blogging commu­nity, would be great choices to run a site like this.
• three And – this is the impor­tant part – it needs to be done well, in a way that doesn’t talk down to them, that empha­sizes quality, not assum­ing the worst of its users.

Why we think Reuters will come up with this:

• I believe in the link economy. Please feel free to link to our stories —  it adds value to all produc­ers of content. I believe you should play fair and encour­age your readers to read-around to what others are produc­ing if you use it and find it interesting.
• Thomson Reuters Presi­dent of Media Chris Ahearn • From an article he wrote back in August. We wrote about it then, too, and we think it suggests that Reuters will figure this out before the Associ­ated Press. The AP is more beholden to its newspa­per partners, and compa­nies like News Corp. and Tribune Corp. have too many inter­ests in their own products. We think offer­ing diverse options would be great for bloggers and would help take much of the stigma away from what they do. But not everyone’s there, sadly. Fingers crossed that the concept behind Attrib­u­tor is a good first step, not a bad last one. source

Posted by Ernie Smith • Permalink