If so, then why would we even care if we could, or could, not exceprt from the AP? After all, we don’t _need_ them, do we? Isn’t that what we’ve been saying all along: we don’t you, AP.

Shelley, slow down. We’ll wait :)

Sometimes an excerpt is useful to flesh out an opinion piece. Normally if I write about the Apologist Press, it is to point out how little they deviate from whatever the official White House line of the day is. I far prefer content from other news sources in any case, so the AP’s hysterical attack on the Drudge Retort isn’t much of a deal to me.

How much of a deal is it going to wind up being to THEM, though? Now that none of us will excerpt them, their content will be confined to MSM sources that a whole lot of us never use and won’t excerpt from. It strains the imagination to believe that excerpting was anything but a positive for the AP in terms of overall readership; I know I am quite likely to click a link if I’m reading a blog post. How is it going to benefit them now that a hell of a lot of the people who used to use them will turn to McClatchy, Reuters, or UPI?

“The organization now wants to charge anyone who quotes their content $2.50 per word or $12.50 for five words. It could be that rates go up beyond that point.”

tech.blorge.com

If that were the AP, it doesn’t matter if now you click on the link and check out the main article. Passing that quote (do numbers count?) along would have cost me over $50.

Now the AP gets to decide what quotes add to the stories or comments? It’s easy to limit word counts or lines, but when you start walking worth you’re talking subjective terms.