AP: Stopping the Presses On Pirated News

Attention news aggregators and bloggers: The Associated Press is watching.

The worldwide news agency vows to “pursue legal and legislative actions” against websites and bloggers that pirate AP content.

“We must be paid fully and fairly,” AP Chairman Dean Singleton told members at the company’s annual meeting in San Diego. “We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories.”

The 163-year-old news cooperative operates 240 bureaus worldwide to provide backbone news coverage to its newspaper, radio, TV and online members.

The AP has long served newspapers, but has recast itself in the digital age to serve Internet portals, including Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO), which pay for AP’s content. But many news aggregators don’t pony up, drawing readers away from newspaper, radio and TV websites served by the AP.

Online subscribers to AP may be problematical for newspaper publishers because they don’t pay newspapers directly for content that originated on their pages. Websites counter that they drive traffic to newspapers’ websites, but publishers say the added traffic isn’t enough to cover the cost of generating the news content.

Meanwhile, AP struggles with declining revenues from member newspapers. The wire service agreed to cut rates by $35 million in 2010, following a $30 million cut this year. Overall, the non-profit news cooperative expects revenue from US newspapers to drop by about 33% between 2008 and 2010.

Some newspapers have threatened to pull out of the AP and cut the news service from their budgets. A few have established agreements to share regional stories, eroding AP’s core service that provides state and regional news to member newspapers.

AP rate cuts play out against declining revenue, falling circulation, job cuts and bankruptcies in the newspaper industry.

E.W. Scripps (SSP) closed the Rocky Mountain News. McClatchy (MNI) and Gannett (GCI) have announced stuff cuts. Hearst’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer eliminated its print edition and now exists as a website. Hearst may also close the San Francisco Chronicle if workers don’t agree to drastic cuts.

The New York Times Co. (NYT) has taken a similar negotiating tactic and threatens to close the Boston Globe unless unions agree to cuts. The company has cut staff and pay at its flagship paper, the New York Times. The Tribune Co., publisher of major papers such as the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, has filed for bankruptcy.