Publish2 goes after AP with online news sharing service

May 26, 2010 — 8:47am ET | By Ron Miller

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Scott Karp
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This week Publish2 announced a new product they hope will change the way publications distribute content on the web. The announcement came at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference in New York City and according to Publish2 CEO Scott Karp, the new service should disrupt the traditional content syndication process controlled by the Associated Press throughout the 20th century.

Publications sign up for the service, and then can make content available for syndication and use content provided through the service. They can even publish directly to a newswire or a news group as they wish. The process has been designed to give publishers complete control over the process, even excluding publications they don't want to get access to their content, such as direct competitors. Publishers also maintain control over defining content reuse rights.

Busy publications can completely automate the process using the FTP protocol to update content automatically according to the syndication and distribution terms they have defined as defaults.

Karp calls this system a direct replacement for AP content syndication, which, in his view, is a marked improvement:

"Newspapers can replace the AP’s obsolete cooperative with direct content sharing and replace the AP’s commodity content with both free, high-quality content from the web and content from any paid source," Karp wrote.

There is also a WordPress plug-in available, which suggests it's for all types of publishers, whether traditional print media moving online or bloggers looking to capitalize on a new syndication system. Either way, it looks like it could be the start of a new media distribution system that puts the power of syndication and the choice of content directly in the hands of publishers.

For more information:
- see Scott Karp's blog post