Distributing investigative journalism: two steps forward, one step back

The AP has announced that they will add the output of four non-profit investigative journalism organizations to AP Exchange, the system used by newspapers to search for content.

On the surface, this is a good thing. But a Jeff Jarvis and others have pointed out, it's not really the right way forward. There is nothing stopping the Center for Investigative Reporting, The Center for Public Integrity, The Investigative Reporting Workshop, and ProPublica from distributing their content to every publisher in the world, and nothing stopping every print outlet in the world from supporting their work (or, as ProPublica directs, stealing it).

Access to a proprietary distribution and discovery system should be non-news in 2009. The future is direct citation of quality content, with print publishers as aggregators and channel. Any newspaper that wasn't already monitoring the (extensive) web content provided by these organizations is way behind the times.