Google News no longer hosting AP articles

Posted by Leah McBride Mensching on January 11, 2010 at 3:33 PM

Google News has stopped hosting new Associated Press articles, which implies contract negotiations between the search giant and news service "may have broken down," CNNMoney.com reported today.

As of this posting, a search for the AP as a news source does not bring up any articles dated after Dec. 23, 2009; however, AP stories licensed by other news sites do appear. The licensing agreement between the AP and Google is "believed" to be up for renewal at the end of this month, but AP is not withholding its content, TechCrunch reported.

"... older AP content from before Christmas continues to be available on Google News. If the AP were no longer licensing its articles to Google, those older articles likely would also no longer be available," TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld wrote today. "[Google] is showing the AP in a very visible way what will happen if Google News no longer carries AP stories, and they are doing this before the negotiations are up so that the AP can measure the loss in readership that Google News brings."

On Friday, Danny Sullivan wrote for Search Engine Land that when he contacted Google about the issue, he received the following statement: "We have a licensing agreement with the Associated Press that permits us to host its content on Google properties such as Google News. Some of that content is still available today. At the moment we're not adding new hosted content from the AP."