iPublish2

Some say the wave that is Publish2 is going to knock the Associated Press out of the water.

Right now Publish2 provides free content. The AP doesn’t.

Implemented in order to maximize reach and coverage, on May 28, Publish2’s Ryan Sholin told the Neiman Lab that Publish2 “did not set out to killed the Associated Press.” http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/05/publish2s-ryan-sholin-we-did-not-set-out-to-kill-the-associated-press/

Anything that eliminates jobs for journos, I am against as a rule. But I’m not so sure that Publish2 is going to drive the hard-working men and women of AP into unemployment. Not at least until Publish2 can figure out how to start getting consumers to pay for content.

Rick Edmonds, who writes for Poynter, reminds us that Publish2 only threatens a small part of the AP’s market; this big fish will take a long while to reach the bottom of the ocean. http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=123&aid=184280/ He also noted that the AP has their own sharing service which I was not aware of. http://www.ap.org/apexchange/

Publish2 worked for me as a journo because it provided a clean, easy-to-use place to showcase my print and online clips. Major design and content changes at http://www.publish2.com/ have reorganized the site. Content providers are now called newsgroups. I.E. I am a newsgroup because I posted my clips to the site. Giving largely unverified people the newsgroup title does not make them a legitimate news source. As much as I appreciate the title, I’m not sure I’ve earned it yet. I am a journalist, but I am not a newsgroup in the traditional sense.

A more personal implication of this war between services: the redesign scrubbed clean my clips. Last week a few people told me “your link doesn’t work.” I checked it out: I still had a profile on the site, but now I didn’t have any clips or links anymore. Damnit.

Worried my digital brand was eroding, I furiously began re-linking stories onto the new Publish2. http://publish2.com/newsgroups/adam-popescu-links/ Exhausted, I quit after loading about a dozen stories, tag bombing to the nth. That would have to do for now. I went to bed a tired, but fulfilled man.

Then today I woke to a Google Alert—guess whose clips are at the top of the list under Publish2’s New York tag? http://www.publish2.com/search/links?q=&tag=new%20york/ Not only that, but look what popped back up—my old clip link, working again: http://www.publish2.com/newsgroups/adam-popescu-clips/

I guess you won me over Publish2. Now if we could start making some money together, I might even change my initials. Until then, I’m still Mr. AP.

—Adam Popescu