'An Associated Press analysis of Barack Obama's widely praised (across the political spectrum) speech last Thursday drew much criticism from liberals and media critics last week for its dour tone. Would the AP offer the same kind of muted response to Sarah Palin's big address on Wednesday night? Not exactly. The article by Tom Raum and Liz Sidoti opened: "Sarah Palin delivered. An embattled vice presidential candidate, a novice on the national stage, the head of a family suffering its 'ups and downs,' the first-term Alaska governor rocked the GOP convention with a star-turning performance."' [E&P]

It's … refreshing(?) to see Keith Olbermann aim his ire at somebody other than a MSNBC colleague. But last night's trantrum didn't stray far — he spat it at one of his own. That is, a member of the press.

Just after Barack Obama got done bringing Oprah to tears, the Associated Press fired off an arguably pre-written report from Charles Babington that countered what most of the pundits had agreed: that Obama's speech was powerful, formidable, and would make life harder for John McCain.

Babington, however, said "instead of dwelling on specifics, [Obama] laced the crowning speech of his long campaign with the type of rhetorical flourishes that Republicans mock and the attacks on John McCain that Democrats cheer. The country saw a candidate confident in his existing campaign formula: tie McCain tightly to President Bush, and remind voters why they are unhappy with the incumbent."

Of course Olbermann's attack might better be suited not at Babington, but at his boss Ron Fournier, the wire's Washington bureau chief who wants more analysis — some say "slant" — in his reporters' copy. Keith is particularly upset because the AP's version of events because its article will run in possibly hundreds of newspapers, while Olbermann's rant will run on only thousands of political blogs.

When copy editors are working an article but don't yet have all the words, sometimes they fill in areas they need to come back to with markers like "TK." Some high school yearbook staffs, on the other hand, will use the placeholder "black girl" for a female student's name. Last night, the Associated Press was putting together its piece on the upcoming vice presidential names that Obama and McCain would release — but it never got around to removing its placeholder. This is how the article went out on the wire before most, but not all, outlets corrected it: "His top contenders are said to include Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Less traditional choices mentioned include former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, an abortion-rights supporter, and Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Democratic vice presidential prick in 2000 who now is an independent." Okay, fine. Typo. Whatever.

Ron Fournier, the Associated Press' new Washington D.C. bureau chief who hopes to rewrite the rules of reporting, is a known Karl Rove lover. But his obvious political leanings were not, insists John McCain's camp, the reason they tried, though failed, to solicit him to help run the campaign — it was just because Fournier — whose new job responsibilities include calling the election's winner this November — was so adept at the political process. A political process that, at the time, involved him running the now defunct pundit site HotSoup.com, which he co-founded with Matthew Dowd, chief strategist for the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign. Again, just a happy coincidence.

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Under Washington bureau chief Ron Fournier, the Associated Press is moving away from traditional journalism (read: reverse pyramids, equal voices to all sides) and implementing a "less bullshit" strategy: "In the stories the new boss is encouraging, first-person writing and emotive language are okay. So is scrapping the stonefaced approach to journalism that accepts politicians’ statements at face value and offers equal treatment to all sides of an argument. Instead, reporters are encouraged to throw away the weasel words and call it like they see it when they think public officials have revealed themselves as phonies or flip-floppers."

The argument could be made — an, on this website, we might have even made it — that moving in this direction is a good idea, because it outs politicians and other snakes for their true agendas without having to play nicey-nice because of journalism's rules.

Then there's the other side of things:

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Not only is storm chasing a rabid hobby, but it's a career subject to the same "professional jealousy" as other industry where dollars and reputations are on the line! In, in language we can understand: Opportunities for gossip that's rife scandal!

As a doctored tornado video — supposedly of a Nebraska tornado last week, but more likely of a a Kansas tornado filmed four years ago with some haphazard editing — made the rounds to some 2,000 websites and 60 digital customers through distribution from Associated Press, blame is being thrown about every which way.

The AP blamed Andy Fabel, who they paid $295 for the video, for faking the clip after fellow storm chaser Dan Robinson of Appalachian Skies Media called foul. But Fabel insists the footage isn't doctored, and that he's being accused of faking it because people like Robinson are jealous of his "success."

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The Associated Press has pulled video footage of a Nebraska tornado that touched down last week after its authenticity has been questioned. The footage is, likely, taken from a Kansas tornado filmed four years ago, with the clip flipped horizontally, sped up, with power lines added and trees removed. The AP had paid storm chaser Andy Fabel an astronomical $295 for the clip. They will likely want their money back. [AP]

Anti-spyware, high-definition, outsourcing, podcast, text messaging, social networking, snail mail, and Wikipedia are now acceptable terms to use, according to the updated Associated Press Style Manual, which is the bane of j-school students everywhere. Gone are barmaid, blue blood, malarkey, milquetoast, Photostat, riffraff and WAC (for Women's Army Corps., no longer used by the U.S. military). And because nobody is going to be confused by "9/11," it's now an acceptable proper noun that also means "Sept. 11." On the politically correct front, stop writing "mentally retarded"; please begin using "mentally disabled." And if you're going to talk about a person of color, note that the previous edition said the "preferred term is black," but now "an American black person of African descent" should be described as "African-American." Oh, but "black is also acceptable. The terms are not necessarily interchangeable." [AP]

Media fingerprint technology isn't exactly new. Movie studios use it when they send out screeners to track down who's leaking copies of Hancock on BitTorrent. Record companies do the same with advanced albums. And now … the Associated Press? Using a technology from Attributor, the AP plugs its copyrighted content into the software, which then crawls the web to match strings of that content against material published elsewhere. If a match is made, the AP (or other clients) are alerted, and "the software can be programmed to automatically send out 'takedown notices' that require sites to remove contested content, and the data it generates could end up being used to build a case against alleged copyright infringers."

That's how the AP originally found all that material on The Drudge Retort, and started a flame war with bloggers.

One big problem: The software will likely have a hard time, or no ability at all, to determine actual fair use (like a video clip snippet for a movie review) and genuine infringement, which means there's room for plenty of false positives. And if the software automatically fires off a DMCA takedown notice, folks like the AP could find themselves in trouble of their own: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act bars copyright owners from issuing this types of requests for instances when there is no actual infringement (i.e. sending the notices as a bullying tactic), and can hold those owners liable for the defense's damages, including legal fees.

But this type of software, it turns out, can be used for good! And surprise of all surprises, none other than Conde Nast sees the light.

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So much for that whole "Associated Press v. The Bloggers" scandal. After launching an attack on liberal site The Drudge Retort for its supposed, ahem, liberal use of headline and article excerpts, and then getting hosed by anyone with a Blogger account and a basic understanding of Fair Use, the AP says the issue has been resolved. "The resolution of this matter illustrates that the interests of bloggers can be served while still respecting the intellectual property rights of news providers." Not that anything was actually resolved, like whether the wire service actually think people are going to pay to quote five or more words. [PC]

When the Associated Press meets on Thursday with a group of bloggers, collectively known as the Media Bloggers Association but not exactly elected to speak on behalf of a loosely aligned group of publishers, to discuss the little matter of excerpting their articles, perhaps they'll have a very interest topic to talk about: How the AP expects to be paid for a single five-word quotation. Yes, the wire service is selling "quotation licenses," effectively charging publishers who want to stick a few words between certain punctuation for a legal right they actually already enjoy under the First Amendment's Fair Use provisions. There's a sliding scale, with quotations of 5-25 words a bargain $12.50, while quotes that are 251-plus words going for $100. To the New York Times' Saul Hansell, this policy is just the AP's "attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt." Cute phrasing!

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The Associated Press, made up of a consortium of newspapers that pay into the organization to license content, committed a material sin against new media last week when it threatened a lawsuit against left-y website The Drudge Retort for copy/pasting headlines and article copy in a manner, at least according to the AP's legal counsel, that did not meet the spirit of Fair Use provisions. Then the blogs got up from their chairs, walked over to the filing cabinet, grabbed their machetes, and began slicing through the AP's reputation blog post by blog post. Smartly, the AP retracted its decision against Retort (though kept alive their cease and desist), and now sits in limbo, weighing its options.

It's already involved in court proceedings against VeriSign-owned Moreover, which basically does the same thing as Retort, but with deeper pockets and wider distribution. But the AP's decision to go after "the little guy" has earned in a number of foes, many of whom insist they're boycotting the service, which, uh, they don't even pay for, so big whoop.

But when it comes to The Drudge Retort, and its owner Rogers Cadenhead, the AP might not have to wait very long. Cadenhead is weighing a countersuit. After all, if the AP's claim is that his use of brief excerpts decreases the market value of its product, it could very well be argued that by posting the snippets, Retort is increasing the demand for those stories.

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After sending a cease and desist letter to liberal news website The Drudge Retort citing copyright violations, the Associated Press is, for now, backing off efforts to get the site to pull headlines and copy quotations from the wire service, which it claims are not covered by Fair Use provisions. That the entire blogosphere reacted to the AP's move by taking a big publicity shit on it probably helped bring about the retreat. [NYT]

Like Entertainment Tonight prematurely announcing the birth of Angelina Jolie's twin babies (which if true, interestingly, would've made the babies premature), the Associated Press called Hillary Clinton's concession to Barack Obama too early. It didn't take her campaign even a half hour to announce, on The View and elsewhere, that the AP got it wrong. But the wire is standing by this unassailable fact: Obama has finally, for all intents and purposes, and two years after this whole campaigning business started, swept up the Democratic nomination.

But in the never-ending battle that is news media, not everyone is jumping on the AP's report:

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So much for youth being able to multi-task and be more efficient. Studying "news consumption patterns of young adults between the ages of 18 and 34 in Britain, India and the United States," the Associated Press found that young people "experienced news fatigue, meaning they were overloaded with facts and updates and had trouble connecting to more in-depth stories. Participants yearned for quality and in-depth reporting, but had difficulty immediately accessing such content. This experience was common across participants’ race, gender and geographic location. Additionally, the anthropologists noted that the news habits of the young consumers were dramatically different from those of previous generations." Perhaps because they're being conditioned to treat their Facebook News Feed like the New York Times.