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Publish2, a news curation and linking startup, unveiled its news distribution platform, News Exchange, on Monday. The company hopes this initiative will replace the Associated Press’s “obsolete cooperative” and monopoly over content distribution to newspapers.

So how will the Publish2 News Exchange compete with the news cooperative giant? By creating a “New Associated Press for the 21st Century,” a network that includes both free and paid content that enables news organizations to easily distribute their content to subscribed news media that can then publish the content in print or online. The new platform is currently in beta and will be rolled out this weekend, but users new to Publish2 can still register.

Although the new platform is aimed at newspapers, several new media organizations (including MashableMashable) have signed up for content distribution. In a blog post announcing the new product, Publish2 CEO Scott Karp said, “We’re enabling newspapers to benefit for the first time from the disruptive power of the web, and from the efficiency of production on the web.”

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Content Distribution and Subscription

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The News Exchange enables newspapers to replace AP content subscriptions with web content, and in exchange web producers are able to showcase their brands in print. As Karp points out, print publishing and distribution still drive newspaper operations, even its web production, which sometimes is nothing more than a dumping ground for stories from the day’s paper. The goal is to bridge the gap between print and web publishing, Karp wrote in his post. The platform makes it easier to distribute and subscribe to content through “newswires” set up by participating news organizations online through authenticated webfeeds, FTP, etc.

For example, Mashable newswires include all of our site channels for specific topics, as well as a general newswire for all of our content. In a demo, Publish2 Director of News Innovation Ryan Sholin said print publishers are able to easily subscribe to a newswire and feed that the content into their print publishing content management systems.

In setting up a newswire, news organizations can control who can use their content as well as how that content is used. Sholin also pointed out that some news organizations already have content sharing agreements in place. The News Exchange gives them a place to efficiently share that content with one another, he said.

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Story Ideas and Budget Items

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Although content distribution is at the core of the new product, several other features make content sharing and production more strategic and efficient. For example, the Story Ideas feature enables news organizations to create specific ideas that have yet to be reported and produced as a way to pitch the idea to other news companies. It’s also a way for news organizations to put out a call for coverage on stories they don’t have the resources to report on at the moment, said Sholin.

“Maybe one newspaper editor says they’d like an explainer on how offshore oil rigs work, then 18 more editors request that idea, too,” Sholin said. “Suddenly, other journalists in the system see it’s a popular request. There might be a nonprofit news org or even a freelancer with experience reporting on the topic who can answer the question and write the story.”

If there is a big story that is coming up, and a news company wants to promote it, they can individually add the story with a summary as an upcoming story budget item that its subscribers should keep an eye out for.

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What’s Missing?

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Analytics: Because the News Exchange is still in beta and has yet to be rolled out, there are some missing features. The big one publishers will be concerned about is being able to track how your story is used by your subscribers. There’s no easy way of doing this — especially if a web story is being published in print — aside from, perhaps, the publisher sending a courtesy PDF showing where the story appeared.

However, Sholin said a form of analytics will come. “We’re going to make sure news organizations know where their stories are published, when, how often, and if possible, what page in the paper they’re running on,” he said. The goal, he said, is to provide news orgs with data on how their content is used, and as News Exchange gets rolled out, Publish2 is going to play with different variation of analytics and reporting though it may require a manual effort from news orgs using the content.

Photos and Tagging: Other features will include the capability to share photos and more easily find specific content through automated semantic tagging.

Marketplace: Another feature that news organizations will likely be happy about that is in the works is Publish2  is planning for a marketplace that Sholin said will allow news orgs to set a price on subscriptions to their newswires or sell content a la carte.

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The top stories in the mainstream press are markedly different than those that lead on social media platforms, a recent study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism revealed.

Furthermore, what is popular on one social network rarely proves popular on another. In the 29 weeks that the Center tracked news items on blogs, TwitterTwitter and YouTubeYouTube, the three platforms only shared the same top story once — the week of June 15-19, 2009, when Iranian citizens flocked to the streets to contest the results of the presidential election.

Let’s take a look at what was popular on the different social networking sites and how that compares to what gained traction with traditional news media in 2009.

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Blogs

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Of the three social media platforms examined, news-oriented blogs and mainstream media have the greatest overlap. Bloggers tend to credit traditional news outlets for their information and focus on the same topics, mainly political and international news. Even so, the two had the same top story for a mere 13 of the 49 weeks they were evaluated together.

Although blogs cover many of the same topics, the study found that bloggers tend to focus on more ideological and emotional stories — particularly those concerning human rights, like access to healthcare services or privacy on Facebook — and often with a personal or partisan angle. Bloggers also like to make a story out of “off-beat” or “buried” items in mainstream media coverage.

Although bloggers often attribute their material to the mainstream press, this rarely happened in the reverse. Over the course of the year, the study found only one story that the mainstream media picked up from the blogosphere: a story based on a number of controversial e-mails about climate research dubbed “Climate-gate”.

Because bloggers are so largely dependent on the mainstream media for their information — more than 99% of the stories cited in blogs linked to the websites of traditional news outlets — it will be interesting to see what will happen once major sources like The New York Times and The Times go behind paywalls. Where will bloggers get their information? Will they be as likely to link to stories if they are behind paywalls? How dramatically will that hurt referral traffic to traditional news sites?

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Twitter

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Compared to the blogosphere, Twitter’s community uses the platform more for sharing important breaking news items than for personal or political discussion, a method shaped both by the 140-character word limit — which does not allow for lengthy reflections — the service imposes, and because it is able to disseminate information through lists of followers quickly.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, technology was far and away the most popular new topic on Twitter in 2009; of all the news stories shared or discussed on the platform, 43% were focused on technology. Technology makes up a marginal 1% of news coverage at mainstream outlets and 8% of blogs. Notably, few Twitter users appear to be interested in economic news; 1% of all news tweets were about the economy, compared to 10% of articles in the traditional press and 7% posts on blogs.

Although technology is the Twitter community’s primary interest by and large, the top news subject in the latter half of 2009 was the aftermath of the Iranian election results. It remained the top news story on Twitter for seven straight weeks, much longer than on any other platform. Collectively, Twitter was more concerned with foreign events than the blogosphere and the traditional press, likely because its userbase is much more international.

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YouTube

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Like Twitter, YouTube is more of a platform to share and curate important information than a forum for lengthy discussions, although viewers are often active in the comments. Because videos take a long time to edit and upload, there is less of an emphasis on breaking news than on Twitter.

What’s unique about YouTube is that its focus on politics and foreign events far surpasses that of any other platform. Of the news videos on YouTube, politics attracted 21% of views and international news attracted 26%, compared to 15% and 9% in the mainstream media, respectively. The study intelligently points out that this is because “videos transcend language barriers in a way written text cannot.”

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What This Means for Mainstream Media

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The study underlines the large disconnect between what mainstream media thinks is “top news” and what social media users consider newsworthy, as well as the different kinds of content and discussion each platform attracts.

It also suggests that if traditional news companies want to succeed online — that is, if they want to attract a large number of page views and be relevant to users on the web — they may need to alter their content to match readers’ interests.

What do you find most interesting about the study? What does it imply for the future of news media, both new and old?

[img credit: DRB62]

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