Irony and dissonance
This sharing action by me and the web multitudes has now become a natural one in terms of content, and I'm happy to see the AP actively encouraging that.
How would you like that content served sir? Now that's customer service!
But it's a puzzling dissonance when you follow the link through to the article itself and read this quote from AP's Tom Curley at the World Media Summit held in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China. The location is of course also dripping with irony.
We content creators have been too slow to react to the free exploitation of news by third parties without input or permission," Curley, the AP's chief executive, told a meeting of 300 media leaders in Beijing. Crowd-sourcing Web services such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook have become preferred customer destinations for breaking news, displacing Web sites of traditional news publishers," Curley said. "We content creators must quickly and decisively act to take back control of our content.
Curley was not to be outdone, with News Corp's Rupert Murdoch following on and doing his best to label his customers criminals.
The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators — the people in this hall — who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph.
I'm no big media commentator but even I know enough to see that their words don't appear to match their actions. I'm also no Huffington Post or Google, but I and millions of others aggregate and curate content to our own small circles via a variety of web tools.
Comments [0]