The Associated Press, a co-operative started by newspapers to share costs and news, has been getting cancellation notices from papers as large as the Minneapolis Star Tribune since its new rates were distributed in July and now the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., is challenging the two-year cancellation notice that's part of the current contract. The argument, according to E&P: the new rate structure that starts in 2009 is actually a new contract and the paper should not be bound by the old agreement.

AP takes a different stance, as you can imagine, with spokesman Paul Colford telling us: "There is no new contract involved in what is a service upgrade.
At the same time, the AP will be working with the Spokesman-Review and other papers to help resolve concerns they may have during the rollout of the new Member Choice packaging and pricing plan, which will provide newspaper members with greatly expanded basic news coverage."

AP says its outlets include 1,500 daily English-language U.S. newspapers and that most are members. The wire service also has considerable clients in TV, radio, international, and online. As of April, newspapers represented 27 percent of the co-op's revenues; International (broadcast, newspaper services, etc.), 22 percent; U.S. broadcast, 17 percent; digital, 17. 

In a letter excerpted by E&P, a lawyer for the Spokesman-Review says the paper "will not be executing a new contract reflecting the changes as required by the AP in the new Member Choice program. ... The new contractual arrangement represents a continued and material shift by the AP of separating services from the basic package so that some services will be available only by signing up for supplemental programs. Thus, AP services that formerly were part of a basic plan will now only be available through a supplemental plan approach. This dilutes the value of the basic Breaking News plan and constitutes a material change in the quality and breadth of the services offered by the AP under the basic contract."

For good measure, the Spokesman-Review also claims local and state service has deteriorated and that the new rate is too high. One translation: we wanted more options and now that we have them, we have an early out. Spokesman-Review editor Steve Smith e-mailed E&P: "On that basis, the old contract will expire Dec. 31 and we'll not sign a new one. In a sense, it's not a cancellation at all, but a decision to decline signing any new contracts."

Star-Trib: Meanwhile, MinnPost.com reported that the Star Tribune has served its 2-year notice. For a sense of what readers their might be missing in 2010, the site counted 18 AP stories or photos in the Strib's news sections the day of its report; a wire-service credit on nearly all national sports news and briefs, plus a half-dozen other items. Strib editor Nancy Barnes has been an outspoken critic of AP pricing but her managing editor Rene Sanchez told MinnPost.com this is "not a hostile gesture, by any means. It's the beginning of an assessment of our business model, not the end." Translation: give us better terms.

Conventional wisdom would say that wire services, particularly one that covers all levels of news, gain importance as gap-fillers when newspapers cut newsroom staffs. But they're also handy budget tools, allowing managers to slash large line items in a single move. Expect more along this line. 

Related

• AP At The Crossroads: Newspapers Feel 'Betrayed' By Online Focus

Check out the best business jobs in digital media. Go here for paidContent.org Job Board.

It's a good time to be covering politics, given the interminable campaign season. In between the two big conventions, Forbes checks in on Politico.com, a news site founded in 2007 by former Washington Post reporters John Harris and Jim VandeHei. The company, which operates a website, a print version and a video operation, has had a few months here and there of profitability.

While the site has generated around 2.3 million uniques last month, according to Nielsen, it has topped the 3 million mark. And if you look at comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) numbers, Politico is much lower, drawing roughly 1 million uniques last month). And with the campaign over in little more than two months, how does it plan to grow? Essentially, by covering politics as intently as ESPN (NYSE: DIS) covers sports, says CEO Frederick Ryan.

-- Yes we can—advertise: The site's biggest advertiser has been Barack Obama's campaign. Politico.com has attracted about $2.4 million in online ad sales since January—the Obama campaign has spent $444,000 on the site since then, according to Nielsen AdRelevance. After that, the next big spender has been the Democratic National Committee, which bought $127,700 worth of ad space. That could be a problem once those two have no reason to advertise. But VandeHei claims those numbers are flawed, insisting that only 20 percent of Politico.com's revenues come from ads tied to the campaign season. Furthermore, despite the decline of newspapers and the rise of the web, VandeHei says 60-70 percent of its revenues come from the "mostly free" 25,000-circulation newspaper that's distributed in Washington.

-- An ad network and a wire service: The typical way to try to boost ad sales these days is to form a vertical ad network. Politico.com is prepping one with 25 newspaper sites. The idea is, with newspapers cutting back on their own staffs, Politico can serve almost like a wire service for DC coverage. Its sales staff is offering to sell politically-focused ad inventory in exchange for syndicated Politico content. The company just made three additions to its eight-member sales staff and is trying to bring in large marketers like Lexus and American Express. 

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Bob Rice has had many careers. He was an attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice, a partner at law firm Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy, C.E.O. of a tech startup, and now runs merchant bank Tangent Capital, which he founded in 2005.

In his spare time, Rice managed to write Three Moves Ahead: What Chess Can Teach You About Business, one of the more interesting business reads to come down the pike this year, in which he uses the tried-and-true strategies of chess for insight into running a business.

Today, he's squeezing in some blogging. One day. One place: Portfolio.com.

Ah, those Sand Hill Road visionaries, the venture capital guys who finance the future and dictate the trends. It must be fun out there, getting the first glimpses of tomorrow. But suddenly there's a wonderful irony at work: That very future is destroying their industry.

Newspapers are rife with stories about the decline of big V.C. investments, pointing to the trend as a sign of a more conservative investment environment. But I don't think that's really the issue.

Instead, something much more profound is going on: The basic V.C. model is broken. And new technology is driving a much more efficient system for capital allocation to startups.

In fact, technology is largely at fault both for what's wrong with the V.C. world and for what's replacing it. The problem with the industry is this--it's just too cheap to start new companies these days.

Virtual offices allow talent to gather from around the country to work on a new idea without having to quit full-time jobs too early. Servers, computers, and bandwidth are essentially free, and a robust telecommunications platform can be rented for a few tens of dollars a month. Software development can be outsourced without taking on big fixed costs. There are countless programs to manage customer relations, mine contacts, handle the books, and plan and monitor projects. And of course, the internet has reduced the costs of finding customers and testing new concepts to nearly nothing.

Okay, so what? Well, the classic V.C.'s simply have too much money under management, and too expensive a talent pool, to waste time looking at investing anything less than $10 million in a project. Meantime, no entrepreneur wants to give up equity by taking in more money than he absolutely needs. So, when it only costs a few million to get a serious new company off the ground, how can the V.C.'s really play? They have to find places to make gigantic gambles, usually overpaying because the other big V.C.'s are also trying to invest in the few really big-dollar opportunities out there. It has become a system doomed to failure.

The flip side of the story is the rise of angel investor groups. These investment consortiums have always been ideally positioned to provide $500,000 to $5 million equity injections; but until recently, that wasn't enough to get a serious effort off the ground. More fundamentally, however, they have historically not been terribly investor-friendly, largely because the individual members have other occupations.

The individual members didn't work in the same place or even at the same times, so angels were terribly inefficient at evaluating transactions, sharing information, and negotiating and documenting deals.

Those days are over, thanks to software developed by David Rose, founder of the New York Angels (yes, I belong). Angelsoft is a wonderful collaboration platform that manages deal flow, helps match talent and expertise to projects, provides easy-to-use data rooms for potential investors, and generally drives the investment process. It combines project management and social networking in a way that, for the first time, makes the angel process efficient for both the company seeking capital and the potential investors.

The big news now is that, in a period of just a couple of years, over 400 angel groups around the globe have standardized on the platform. That means, of course, that they will also be able to share deals between themselves, vastly expanding the capital and expertise available for any given project.

And entrepreneurs can now create one submission to get access, literally, to a world of sophisticated, organized investors. It sounds like a revolution to me. Check it out at the group's website.

And so, once again, technology is driving a paradigm shift. But this time, it's France in 1789: The progenitors of change are becoming the victims.

Troubled online music retailer Napster (NSDQ: NAPS) has hired UBS (again) to explore strategic alternatives, including a possible sale. The news was made in a letter to shareholders, urging them not to vote for three outside activists, looking to get representation on the board. In the letter, the company notes that the candidates' previous work experience—musician, nursing home executive, ice cream franchisee, middle management banking executiv—is "irrelevant to a company like Napster." It also notes that contrary to suggestions, it is open to a sale if that turns out to be the best option. Release.

If this all sounds familiar, it is. The company said exactly two years ago that it had retained UBS to explore strategic alternatives. Unfortunately for shareholders, who have seen the stock decline precipitously, that didn't go anywhere. The difference this time: The stock has gotten so low—trading close to cash, even—that it would be a cheap pickup for many companies.

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Social Media Deals Report: This 199-page report, filled with charts and data, examines the categories, number and size of VC and M&A deal in social media from 2007 through 2008. Visit the ContentNext Reports page

"If anything, the fact that officials recognized the concern about the dollar's decline seems somewhat supportive for the dollar as maybe benign neglect was not so neglectful," Marc Chandler, global head of currency strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman, wrote in a note to clients Thursday. The latest ...

Sales of all the major home and portable consoles fell in Japan during the week ended August 24, having seen a boost the previous week.

Nintendo’s DS retained the top spot on the hardware chart despite a drop of almost 25,000 sales, while Sony’s PSP and Nintendo’s Wii saw sales decline by 17,000 and 18,000 units respectively.

read more

So there are two items to do with YouTube that are making their way around the tech news world. One to do with big billboards that would take up a good portion of the site’s front page real estate - if only briefly upon visitors’ initial arrival; and another to do with captioning, for the hard of hearing and those who don’t happen to speak all the languages of the world.

It goes without saying that the tale behind door number one is naturally bound for bigger headlines than the other, but both may actually prove quite important and potentially very beneficial to the video site. One will presumably make more money for the company, while the other helps bridge quite a few divides. A win-win?

We’ll have to wait and see. SAI’s Michael Learmonth says YouTube is teasing names in the entertainment industry to stand as test cases for the effort, whom it plans to charge the general going rate for the square banner unit now in place: $200,000. If all goes well, a bump in rates can be expected to occur sometime next season. As per convention, YouTube isn’t entertaining the hearsay, valid or not.

Logically the new ad push would be what the bean counters would probably regard as “better to do than not do.” Considering YouTube’s gradual migration to a more officially-sanctioned, premium-content-rich archive, the project would more or less be a boon. But as with anything this “big,” there are tradeoffs. Some would accuse YouTube of losing itself, and the user-generated stuff manufactured by Average Joe and Jane would presumably decline. Or at least waver on a more stagnant plane, because of all the corporate whatever that’s impinging on users’ experience.

At this junction, though, YouTube has no choice. The sacrifice must be made in order to better that bottom line, and now is as good a time as any. If it were to have made the change years ago, it wouldn’t have been managing the sort of traffic it is today. Which wouldn’t have convinced premium content producers — be they from Hollywood or the virally-blessed indie set — to come aboard at the rate some have in the last 12 months or so. Which wouldn’t have given YouTube the potential monetary value and influence it is often claimed to have.

As for that captioning system you might well have forgotten in light of the ad talk, it is something which simply evolves the video service further along and gives it one more tool to add to its publicly-available arsenal. For those looking to broaden their audience and add an extra bit of attention and care to their material, this is one more thing. Put this feature together with the ability to upload and present better-than-usual video resolution, and you’ve got something that seems, well, like TV. Further still, that enhancement coupled with all the moneymaker stuff mentioned above has YouTube looking ever more useful to the mainstream. Just think about it. YouTube’s audience is international. That fact in and of itself makes the site outstanding. And now it can boast this new feature to its users, breaching a good number of linguistic barriers. Intriguing news altogether? Yes, very.

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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

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Project readOn Offers Captions for Any Video
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Mojiti Lets You Edit YouTube Videos, on YouTube!
VideoJug Launches YouTube for How-To Videos
Mobile YouTube Now Includes Most YouTube Videos
YouTube Launching Chinese Version

This may sound like a statement from an arrogant man and believe you me; many people who do not know me well enough strongly believe that I am one such individual with lot of arrogance or ‘air in the head’ as someone said it very recently to me. This is not all; they have given me lot of such amazing adjectives which I always accept with grace and confidence.

Anyways, let me ask one basic question to all those people who do not understand the difference between attitude and arrogance. Do you think that having an attitude of winning is a crime? NO. I don’t think so. Having a winning attitude makes Dhoni what he is today. Having a winning attitude creates business leaders like Ambanis, Mittals and Tatas. It brings in the leadership quality which each one of us should have.

We can’t win businesses or become successful if we don’t have winning attitude. We all have this attitude – we all want to win and try real hard but when it comes to mentioning it upfront, we do not do it and those who do it get branded as arrogant or flamboyant. Thank you.

For me winning is about never losing, never settle for second best and try harder to get the best out of everything. You may be the best but I am better – it doesn’t mean that I am better than you. I am just bettering myself again and again and trying to become better than the best all the time. Is it a crime? NO. Improving self and learning new skills, bettering self, doing better than what you did previously are actually some really good qualities to have in a businessman or in any professional.

I will continue to demonstrate my attitude. I will continue to show it to everyone that I am a winner without mincing words. Its none of my business what you think of me – because I can think for myself. I know what I am doing right or wrong, if you have a difference perspective to it, share it with me and I will listen. I will try and understand your point of view and implement those suggestions if they are worth implementing. So, by accepting your suggestions and implementing those, if you think that I am dumber than you are, I am fine with it. By not accepting any of your suggestions and going ahead with what I thought was right and if this makes you think that I am dumber because I didn’t accept your suggestion, I am fine with it too. Does it make any difference to me? I am the same ‘dumb’ even if I accept or decline. Strange isn’t it? But true. So, why should I bother? As I said, it’s none of my business what you think of me.

Well, by now many of you must be wondering why write such post. What am I trying to prove? I don’t have to prove anything here. I just wanted to share with you my friends that having an attitude and demonstrating it is not a crime. Every one of us have an attitude, some shows it some don’t. So, I am not looking for any advice. I don’t need your attitude, I have of my own. By calling me arrogant or with any other adjective, what are you trying to prove? Aren’t you showing your own attitude that you believed that you are smarter than me and you have the right to correct me? Do I need that from you? So, when you can demonstrate your attitude, why can’t I do it for myself? THINK!

Have a great life ahead – live well and have some attitude. I know you have it, flaunt it. We need lot of it. In India we really need lot of it to come out of that colonial mindset of being servant all the time. And yes, I like the recent campaign by Dainik Bhaskar – Zidd karo, Duniya Badlo! Let’s demonstrate some attitude. If we demonstrate some attitude our industry will be much better place to work. If we demonstrate some attitude our clients would be happy and understand what they want. If we demonstrate some attitude our world would be a better place and India would be able to live healthy and terror free life.

Did I say that my wife loves