A hacked Twitter account is nothing new. Unfortunately, on a regular basis I get suspicious direct messages and tweets from friends and followers with links to who knows where. They’ve been hacked. Usually, their friends flag that and it’s quickly cleaned up.

But what happens when that hacked account has more than a half million followers? When it’s verified and belongs to one of the most venerable international news organizations? When the hacked content isn’t a questionable link but what would be the most major national security story since maybe ever?

Well, that happened yesterday when the Associated Press saw its account compromised and 71 hijacked characters about explosions at the White House sent the stock markets briefly down and got notice of everyone from the FBI to the SEC. The hacked account was quickly taken offline and suspended. But as Ryan Sholin pointed out this morning when the account was reinstated (but briefly before the offending tweet could be deleted) — more than 4,000 people had retweeted that note (and those are only the ones who used the RT button instead of quoting or adding their own commentary). Read more

The Associated Press Stylebook is on a tech kick with its latest updates. Among the new additions, according to a note to online stylebook subscribers: Android, circles (as in Google Plus groups), flash mob, Google Hangout, hashtag, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, retweet, Skype and tablet. The User-Generated Content entry has also been expanded.

The updates were added to the online stylebook and emailed to subscribers on Friday. Since so much of online journalism these days relies on references or links to user-generated/citizen journalism pieces (photos/video taken at the scene by non-journalists or accounts of events shared on social media, for example), I wanted to highlight this addition in particular:
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The Associated Press says it’s filed a lawsuit today against news aggregator Meltwater News in U.S. District Court. The suit claims that Norway-based Meltwater — a paid electronic clipping service that monitors and delivers news stories on keyword-specific topics to its paying customers — spreads original AP content verbatim without paying licensing fees. Those fees help support the AP’s news gathering, but also add costs that Meltwater doesn’t incur, which allows it to offer its service cheaper than the AP, thereby undercutting and competing directly against the news service.

AP President and CEO Tom Curley described the organization as a “parasitic distribution service” in a statement. He says the service “competes directly with traditional news sources without paying license fees to cover the costs of creating those stories. It has a significant negative impact on the ability of AP to continue providing the high-quality news reports on which the public relies.”
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A new study led by the Associated Press shows that more than 50 percent of countries with freedom of information (FOI) laws do not follow them.

In January, the AP sent out “questions regarding terrorism arrests and convictions to the European Union and the 105 countries with right-to-know laws or constitutional provisions.” Only 14 of the 105 countries included answered the questions in full and within the legal deadline. Read more

UPDATE 7/25/11, 3:18 p.m. PST : The AP has responded to some of my points. Their statements are below.

If anything, the AP’s decision to start linking to original sources is a hindrance. Because now, in addition to news outlets everywhere reproducing the same exact stories, they will all include unlinked bit.ly URLs.

Trust me, I’m all for hyperlinking. It’s the fabric of the web, what makes the web functional, and I think more newspapers should be doing it — and more often. But what we have here is a technology problem and an ideology problem. I’m sure if the AP could write through stories using HTML (and, of course, have that HTML stripped once it hits the print CMS), they would do it. Or at least I hope they would.  But their solution of including bit.ly links — in parentheticals — isn’t the way to credit newspapers or drive traffic.

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