AP is a co-op,
From their about page [<a href="http://www.ap.org/pages/about/about.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ap.org/pages/about/about.html</a>]<p>"AP is a not-for-profit news cooperative"<p>The techdirt article makes it sound like AP just figured out how to hyperlink.<p>If you read the original article,[<a href="http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/07/ap-will-link-back-to-newspapers-who-get-scoops/" rel="nofollow">http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/07/ap-will-link-back-to-newspa...</a>]<p>its easy to see that that AP is proposing to link the actual story (scoop) from its member news organizations and only from their member news organisations.<p>Running as a non-profit co-operative news organisation presents its own set of challenges other than just technical, I guess.
If they didn't put links in parentheses, they might break compatibility with teletypes! ...I'm not actually suggesting any newspaper still uses actual teletype machines, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are still plenty of workflows that evolved from teletype use.<p>The teletype and Baudot code do have a pretty amazing legacy. Baudot code was invented in 1870 as a 5-bit mode-shifting character set. This, of course, predates data processing with punch cards (1889), alphanumeric data processing (1929), and binary computers (1937-1941). Even after the introduction of ASCII, the smaller Baudot character set remained a common subset available on a wider range of machines. This is seen in C's "trigraphs", where ??/, for example, may be substituted for \ on machines that don't support that character. Even the Apple II+ had a teletype-style keyboard, supporting only the characters found in Baudot code (the Apple IIe keyboard was the first to support all of the 7-bit ASCII characters).
Hm. Being that the AP is a major competitor for my current project (<a href="http://www.getconduit.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.getconduit.com</a>), I can't help but smile at this. In regard to the parenthesis, I can understand to some extent with printing of scripts and what not, but based on the original article here (<a href="http://bit.ly/nEmkQS" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/nEmkQS</a> <-- See what I did there), it seems like it was a lack of effort more than anything.
The publishers that use the AP tend to be <i>deathly</i> afraid of anything that might lead users away from their sites, so I'm not surprised to see that they haven't used hyperlinks until now. That said, I have no idea why they chose bit.ly, although part of me suspects this is some sort of covert advertising campaign that bit.ly is paying the AP for.
I'm not sure if its a reason for their reluctance to do this earlier, but reporters tend to dislike updating their stories once posted (its better to write new copy), and links often have to be watched, because the serving site may change its urls or worse (if it were particularly annoying) place different copy at the linked page