Associated Mess

Associated Press is somehow annoyed that bloggers have been actually quoting them while linking to their articles, and now they've found their solution to the problem of people actually reading their stuff: they're going to bill every one of us who uses their news, regardless of fair usage rules of publishing...

I don't read their stuff when it's run in the dinosaur (print) media, any more. I rarely read past the first paragraph when something of theirs shows up on the RSS feeds at my e-mail homepage. They have been shown repeatedly to be either lax in the fact-checking or downright crooked, even in their photo publishing, so I usually look elsewhere for confirmation, anyway, when I run across something fed through their filters.

Now, there's a movement afoot among bloggers to boycott AP.

Quite frankly, I'd rather spend my energies mocking the AP, mostly by quoting their articles and pointing out every dadgummed error, flaw in reasoning, cheap shot, and so on which are so common to the news "service", and link them like crazy every time they publish something egregiously stupid or fraudulent. But I think Charles Johnson does a magnificent job of that, already. And so, the boycott probably makes sense, there.

On the other hand, I do have enough to mock and boycott here in my own neck of the woods... although I'm assured the local rag has improved a bit since the last editor got run out of Dodge. At least, now, when they label a news article as "local", they mean within 40 miles of this little city. It's a start.