Reading a Reuters story on their website, I noticed something that highlights to me what’s at the heart of the problem with the Associated Press.

These two international news agencies seem to be poles apart in their philosophy about content sharing.

The AP has been at the centre of a storm of protest during the past week over their approach to bloggers who wish to use their content.

While the AP is all about preventing people from using their content without some rather rigid conformity, including paying per word used, Reuters is all about making it easy to share its content.

For instance, every news report on the Reuters website has this at the foot of each story:

The AP’s news content isn’t publicly accessible as Reuters’ is. So you can’t go to the AP website and read reports and other content as you can with Reuters.

What you can do, though, is read AP content on Google News. So I looked at one story and see this at the foot:

That’s it. No links to facilitate sharing, nothing. Just the bald copyright statement that all rights are reserved.

Now this isn’t about copying and pasting content under fair use, fair dealing or any concept, which is at the heart of the current blogstorm.

Yet it’s rather telling, don’t you think?

Maybe things might change after today when the AP is due to meet with representatives of the Media Bloggers Association.

I have an open mind but I’m not holding my breath.

Related posts:

• AP snippets and a big red flag
• If AP asks for help, answer the call