user: News article: Publish2 Aims to Oust the Associated Press

Publish2, a news curation and linking startup, unveiled its news distribution platform, News Exchange, on Monday. The company hopes this initiative will replace the Associated Press’s “obsolete cooperative” and monopoly over content distribution to newspapers.

So how will the Publish2 News Exchange compete with the news cooperative giant? By creating a “New Associated Press for the 21st Century,” a network that includes both free and paid content that enables news organizations to easily distribute their content to subscribed news media that can then publish the content in print or online. The new platform is currently in beta and will be rolled out this weekend, but users new to Publish2 can still register.

Although the new platform is aimed at newspapers, several new media organizations (including MashableMashable) have signed up for content distribution. In a blog post announcing the new product, Publish2 CEO Scott Karp said, “We’re enabling newspapers to benefit for the first time from the disruptive power of the web, and from the efficiency of production on the web.”

The News Exchange enables newspapers to replace AP content subscriptions with web content, and in exchange web producers are able to showcase their brands in print. As Karp points out, print publishing and distribution still drive newspaper operations, even its web production, which sometimes is nothing more than a dumping ground for stories from the day’s paper. The goal is to bridge the gap between print and web publishing, Karp wrote in his post. The platform makes it easier to distribute and subscribe to content through “newswires” set up by participating news organizations online through authenticated webfeeds, FTP, etc.

For example, Mashable newswires include all of our site channels for specific topics, as well as a general newswire for all of our content. In a demo, Publish2 Director of News Innovation Ryan Sholin said print publishers are able to easily subscribe to a newswire and feed that the content into their print publishing content management systems.

In setting up a newswire, news organizations can control who can use their content as well as how that content is used. Sholin also pointed out that some news organizations already have content sharing agreements in place. The News Exchange gives them a place to efficiently share that content with one another, he said.

Although content distribution is at the core of the new product, several other features make content sharing and production more strategic and efficient. For example, the Story Ideas feature enables news organizations to create specific ideas that have yet to be reported and produced as a way to pitch the idea to other news companies. It’s also a way for news organizations to put out a call for coverage on stories they don’t have the resources to report on at the moment, said Sholin.

“Maybe one newspaper editor says they’d like an explainer on how offshore oil rigs work, then 18 more editors request that idea, too,” Sholin said. “Suddenly, other journalists in the system see it’s a popular request. There might be a nonprofit news org or even a freelancer with experience reporting on the topic who can answer the question and write the story.”

If there is a big story that is coming up, and a news company wants to promote it, they can individually add the story with a summary as an upcoming story budget item that its subscribers should keep an eye out for.

Because the News Exchange is still in beta and has yet to be rolled out, there are some missing features. The big one publishers will be concerned about is being able to track how your story is used by your subscribers. There’s no easy way of doing this — especially if a web story is being published in print — aside from, perhaps, the publisher sending a courtesy PDF showing where the story appeared.

However, Sholin said a form of analytics will come. “We’re going to make sure news organizations know where their stories are published, when, how often, and if possible, what page in the paper they’re running on,” he said. The goal, he said, is to provide news orgs with data on how their content is used, and as News Exchange gets rolled out, Publish2 is going to play with different variation of analytics and reporting though it may require a manual effort from news orgs using the content.

Photos and Tagging: Other features will include the capability to share photos and more easily find specific content through automated semantic tagging.

Marketplace: Another feature that news organizations will likely be happy about that is in the works is Publish2 is planning for a marketplace that Sholin said will allow news orgs to set a price on subscriptions to their newswires or sell content a la carte.
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assistant: Publish2, a news curation and linking startup, unveiled its news distribution platform, News Exchange.