I hope some of the proceeds get back into newsrooms to pay young reporters... Elise Ackerman at the San Jose Mercury News reports that the Associated Press and other news organizations are signing new deals with Google, Yahoo and other Internet companies. Their goal is to collect more click-through income when visitors read the news services' stories.

See New media making deals with 'old' news providers

Ackerman interviewed AP Chief Executive Tom Curley, who told her AP and others in the news industry "early on did not appreciate the value of the content and understand the economics of the marketplace as we do today."

That item arrived thanks to a pointer from Cyberjournalist.net, which also reports on signs of more old-media-to-old-media linkage in The New York Times. Caroline Little, chief of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive even gets her smiling face in the Times story. It's about several newspapers, but not the Times, contracting with aggregator company inform.com. The idea is to compete with Google and Yahoo by providing "related story" links on the newspaper sites.

Back in the Merc, Ackerman mentions that Google is fighting a federal lawsuit by Agence France-Presse, which alleges copyright violations in Google's pointers to AFP material. I suspect there's plenty of discussion of the case among French blogs, which are "noticeably longer, more critical, more negative, more egocentric and more provocative than their United States counterparts," according to a New York Times source.

4:13:31 PM  #