AP's Deal With MyPublic Is Good News All Around

"The bottom line is this: You can’t continue to approach the news in the same way as you always have, in a world where everyone is equipped to capture some of that news. In the days when only the professionals were equipped to do that, then you had one approach. In a world where people have the tools at their disposal to contribute on a regular basis you’d be foolish not to tap into that. The potential here is that you have someone on the scene of almost everything, and as a news wire that’s a really rich resource to tap into."

--AP strategy chief Jim Kennedy, discussing the AP alliance with NowPublic, quoted by Mark Glaser.

The values of this deal are the following:

1) News sites get a vetted distribution channel for participatory media, rather than having to deal with individual contributors (this is a cost and accountability issue)
2) The AP gets one partner to work with who can shape to their needs--and the business opportunity.
3) NowPublic--and by extension its contributors--get the credibility of associating with traditional media that probably only a third of them crave--and a great story for potential funders.

The issues, however, are the following:

1) The world has moved on during the 20 months or so since the AP started exploring what to do in this realm--while big, slow moving companies wait patiently for the ink on the contracts to dry, us wired folks move onto new platforms, like YouTube and Digg to grok the news.
2) The deal doesn't address local news and in my opinion, local is the last frontier, the hardest place to commoditize.
3) How much will it really matter? Next time we have some terrible tragedy, it is really going to matter to the AP whether the emblematic image comes from flickr, YouTube or NowPublic?

Grousing aside, this is a good thing... and a final public outcome of work Jim started at least 2 years ago.