"hot news doctrine of New York State common law" might be something to look at..

oh well..

There was a saying "Content is the King." One part of the story is indeed that AP and other wire news agencies are the kings because they generate original contents. Yet another aspect of this story is that navigational services such as Google are also kings.

Newspapers serving local communities cannot avoid using wire services for non-local coverage. That also means they lose readers on the web, unless they really have local stories that attract non-local readers.

But AP is owned by newspapers and other news outlets. So AP's win benefits them as well.

Some survival strategies that come to my mind:to form an alliance of many local papers and produce some single-themed articles using multiple cities. Another possibility is to form a partnership between papers of a comparable cities so that they can constantly compare with each other on various issues.

Yet another interesting development.