Actually Eric it’s extremely useful. It’s called a “news digest” and it’s a basic tool for editors, not to mention the source of most of the “news roundups” you find in your local paper.

However I think the real answer is that a page full of headlines and first paragraphs would, as has been pointed out, not be fair use. A single headline or lead in a blog post almost certainly is fair use, much as the AP hates the idea.

I also think Scott has nailed the basic dynamic: A combination of newspaper editors afraid of the web and a sclerotic organization that can’t get its head into the 21st century. So they cry havoc and unleash the lawyers of war.

The bloggers will survive nicely, thank you. But I’m not so sure about the AP.

Pity. My second job in journalism was as a reporter/editor for the AP and I remember most of that time fondly.

Here is AP’s fear: if they say that doing this once is OK, then, well, doing it twice is probably OK, and you’re rolling down a slippery slope to their nightmare, which is someone creating a whole site based on a reposted feed of AP’s heds and lead paragraphs.

That sounds to me a whole lot more like a splog than something that anybody would find useful. And I suppose that every blogger has some of their text scraped for use in splogs. It’s annoying, but I doubt that either bloggers or the AP is going to lose money over this sort of thing. So if this is really the AP’s big fear, I think it’s misplaced. It’s an annoyance, not a threat.

-Erik

Can’t fight the revolution.

Excellent point. But regarding the incumbent business model (or “I.B.M.”), press-watchers should read Dorian Bankoil: The AP’s Real Problem Isn’t Bloggers: It’s Its Own Newspapers.