Every syndication dollar earned is another dollar that doesn’t have to be wrung out of highly competitive advertising markets. Importantly, the syndication dollars derive from what journalism organizations do best: create high-quality content. The big notion: create better-than-good-enough content, the kind of stuff that is beginning to flood the web. It’s another way to affirm worth: the more companies that want to use your content, the clearer the value proposition in the digital world….Some have said that in the digital world, news companies need to think of themselves both as creators and aggregators, doing what they do best and linking to the rest. Let’s amend that: creators, aggregators and syndicators, doing what they do best, licensing with zest and linking to the rest.

A core goal of nonprofit news organizations is to create impact. Foundations and donors expect evidence of journalism’s impact in a way that the local department store never did. Jack Shafer wrote a scathing critique of the nonprofit-as-impact driver not long ago, arguing that for-profit media is better insulated against donor whims because the audience [...]

Ever wonder how a site like Talking Points Memo can run AP content without an official relationship with the wire service?
The answer is a site called Mochila, a syndication platform launched back in 2006. About 1,200 websites use the platform, creating a combined audience of 200 million monthly page views for the syndicated content, [...]

I keep thinking about the missed opportunities of Dean Singleton’s speech earlier this week.
What if, instead of bluster and opaquely worded legal threats, Dean Singleton’s address had been a challenge to leverage the breadth and depth of the AP network and its member newsrooms to create something new and better, rather than merely a curse [...]

There’s a feeling in the air this week.
Maybe it’s the news that newspaper publishers are having an off-the-record meeting to talk about revenue models. Maybe it’s the tone Dean Singleton set yesterday when he pledged to protect and license AP content, presumably from aggregators: “We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off [...]