http://www.beischabadelad.com/hints-on-choosing-a-good-company-for-your-payday-loans-9876.html

[…]With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine.[…]…

Your were right, good job. And thank you for the effort.

Also, the supposed benefit from holding off just doesn’t make sense, at least in terms of advancing the story.

“There were advantages, meanwhile, to holding off: I think that got me the interview with the AP’s general counsel, which produced, among other things, almost all of the information in this post.”

Your “information” was the same self-serving AP spin we already know about from Chittum’s dutiful stenography. What you should have done was get Curley on the record about the control-freak things he was described as saying in the New York Times. Were his views accurately characterized?

Either Curley was mischaracterized about the AP’s intentions, or he really does intend to exercise control over use, down to headlines and links: http://bit.ly/euqaT

This line of inquiry would be standard for any other company whose top exec said something extremely controversial. Does Nieman or CJR have any reporters willing to tackle it?

I do hope you realize how lame and “old media hierarchal” this sounds: “I don’t, really, but it’s complicated, and I can’t talk about it.”

Look, I completely agree with the notion of posting raw material, which we do here all the time. And I totally support the notion that a thousand eyeballs looking at a document is far more powerful than me trying to decipher it on my own. So I get your concerns.

But while I had no fundamental objection to posting the AP document right away, I didn’t really see the advantage in this case. There weren’t pages and pages to sift through, there wasn’t a breaking-news imperative, and most of the document wasn’t particularly significant. Whatever might have been gleaned yesterday by posting it in full could also be gleaned today.

There were advantages, meanwhile, to holding off: I think that got me the interview with the AP’s general counsel, which produced, among other things, almost all of the information in this post. It also gave me time to look into a few other threads of the story that contributed a ton to what I wrote today. I can’t really explain why because, obviously, confidential sources were involved, but it did help to have some time without competition. (I know, I know: why view other news outlets as competition? I don’t, really, but it’s complicated, and I can’t talk about it.)

Plus, even without the full document out there, I could make sure to quote extensively from relevant portions such that I wasn’t really leaving anything out. For instance, there’s nothing about withholding content from members in the document that I didn’t quote in this post. Or another way of putting all this would be: The document wasn’t the story; it led to each of these stories.

So, sure, we could have posted it yesterday. It seemed, given everything else, like a good opportunity to build audience, which is something that all news sites, even non-profits with no ads, should strive for. We give these things a ton of thought: The line in this post suggesting that people subscribe to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter in order to stick with the story was influenced by a fascinating study of user engagement. So like everyone else, we’re experimenting. In the past, we’ve posted documents immediately. This time, we waited 24 hours. I don’t know what’s best, but it doesn’t feel like old journalism to me.

I guess, mostly, I just wanted to make it clear that we think about these kind of things a lot, completely understand your points, and will give it even more thought next time. —Zach

To give them due credit, I don’t think AP’s current model is going to last for too long, they are trying to change when it still has some legs left on it.

Does not mean what they are attempting is great, but at least they are not waiting until the wolf is sipping a cuppa in their living room and eying tasty meal to come.

More on it here: http://bit.ly/apmadness

Unless you’re holding it back to verify or authenticate (seems unlikely given two days of debate) the we have to presume you’re doing it to build interest and traffic.

You’re a Nieman site, for Christ’s sake.

But if AP is going to:

1. leave member websites with only with lower-value commodity spot news;
2. reserve to itself higher-value supplemental information;
3. reap the SEO juice of a thousand member websites linking to No. 2 above;
4. Sell ads against their own supplemental content to the exclusion of member ad sales (i.e., abandon the hosted-news model)

Then AP should be prepared to:

1. Radically reduce AP assessment rates to members, or
2. Send pro-rated checks to members for their respective fraction of traffic sent to AP’s supplemental content via member links (reverse syndication), or
3. Both