The 2010 AP Stylebook now carries a dark, dirty little section called "Social Media Guidelines." Squeeeeee! Let's look inside, shall we?

Mallory Jean Tenore, writing in Poynter Online, remarked that "AP Stylebook finally" actually became a trending topic in Twitter in April when the organization moved from "Web site" to "website."

Something those not conversant with professional journalism might keep in mind is that these changes are not an imprimatur, nor a statement of strategic engagement with social media on the part of AP (though they do have a Twitter account and solicited user feedback on what to include). This new section is a judgment on how to use relatively new elements of speech and aspects of content in a standardized fashion so that they will read across all publications and platforms.

It is, after all, as easy to misread journalism from a social media vantage point as it is to misinterpret the significance of social media from the standpoint of traditional media. This should go some ways toward translating two different ways of doing what amounts to the same thing an awful lot of the time.

Until the middle of December, Google hosted AP news stories on its own servers. As the relationship between the AP and Google continued to deteriorate, however, the AP apparently wanted to get a better deal from Google and Google decided to stop adding new content from the AP. According to the old agreement with the AP, Google only has the right to host articles for 30 days after they were published.

Now, however, it looks like the two companies are close to reaching a new agreement that will allow Google to continue to host AP content on Google properties like Google News. For now, however, Google will not add new hosted content from the AP to its properties.

Regarding Google and the AP, Danny Sullivan reports that he just received the following statement from Google:

We have a licensing agreement with the Associated Press that permits us to host its content on Google properties such as Google News. Right now we are not adding new hosted content from the AP. The licensing agreement is the subject of ongoing discussion so we won't be commenting further at this time.

The question, of course, is why Google would say that it has reached a deal with the AP but still isn't adding any new content to the site.

We have contacted Google for comment and will update this post once we hear back.

HNews, which is an extension of the hAtom format, only requires content users to specify information about the source organization. In addition, publishers can specify geo-information, a dateline element, license information and information about the code of ethics that governed the behavior of the author of a given site. At its most basic level, hNews, just like other microformats like hCard or hCalendar, allows search engines spiders to identify and read semantic information that would otherwise be buried within a text and would be hard to identify for search engines.

The Good and the Bad

It's noteworthy that the AP, which has had a rather contemptuous relationship with the Internet, would push this standard, which would only make it easier for search engines and mash-up tools to discover and classify content. At the same time, though, hNews is also a central part of the AP's controversial 'news registry' project, which is meant to track AP content across the web and to make sure that it is not misappropriated.

While the hNews microformat is definitely an interesting development, we can't help but wonder about its role in the AP registry project. Today's hNews press release makes no mention of this project (unlike the press release that announced the registry), so there is some hope that the AP has given up on this scheme or is at least trying to downplay hNews' importance in it.

Currently both apps are available for free (with ads), but Thomson Reuters is looking into a subscription model as well, though according to PaidContent, it will be a few months before we will hear more details about this.

iPhone App Needs Polish

We have seen a number of impressive news applications for the iPhone from prominent players like the New York Times (our review), Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, the BBC, and Bloomberg. Sadly, the Reuters app turned out to be one of the weakest applications in this group.

Let's start with the good news. While a lot of the other apps tend to take a long time to start up and update their news feeds (though the Bloomberg app also starts up and updates quite quickly), the Thomson Reuters app is ready to go within seconds.

Unlike all of its competitors, though, the Reuters app starts up with the Top News feed by default, and presents the rest of the news categories in a long list, without the ability to customize the order of these categories. If you want the app to show you the latest 'Internet News' when you start the program, for example, you are out of luck, as you have to flick past the stories in the 'Top News' section first.

All the other apps also allow users to set shortcuts to their favorite sections, while the shortcut menu in the Reuters app is static (News, Pictures, Video, Markets, and Stocks).

In terms of presentation, the image section is nicely done, but the videos look blocky (even with a fast connection) and the Bloomberg app does a way better job at showing information about the stock market.

Verdict

The app has a lot of potential, especially thanks to the excellent and timely content that Reuters is able to offer. Sadly, the iPhone app currently falls short and doesn't quite deliver the experience to complement the quality of the available content. It should be relatively easy to rectify some of these problems, though, and we hope the see a new and better version of the app soon.

Blogs and personal websites are only responsible for a very small 1.5% of all traffic.

There is also a lot of traffic that is directly shared between news sites. Outbound traffic from other news sites accounts for just as many visits as traffic from search engines (21.6%).

According to Hitwise, the Drudge Report is the largest single source of visitors to news and media sites. Google News (1.5%), CNN.com (1.4%) and Yahoo! News (0.8%) also drive relatively large amounts of traffic, but it is interesting that no single site really holds anything close to a monopoly here.

The Associated Press and the traditional newspaper business are obviously under a lot of stress right now (and in many ways, Craigslist is the real culprit here - not Google News and portals), but a large part of traffic to news sites is driven by portal sites. We can't blame the AP for trying to protect its intellectual property rights, but, as Google's Eric Schmidt described it, "these are ultimately consumer businesses and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more."

Image credit: Flickr user Matt Callow