Has the NFL "sacked" the Associated Press?

Sportscaster Ben Maller shared a link to a Josh Stewart article about Greg Aiello, the National Football League's Senior Vice President for Public Relations.

Stewart quoted Aiello as saying:

"It's like a wire service now, so if I want to get something out today, the quickest way would be Twitter," says Aiello. "As opposed to the old days where you'd send it to AP, and then when the AP got it on the wire, everybody had it. Or more recently you e-mailed it to everybody in the media at the same time, and they communicated it. And we still do all those things, but now we can put it on our Twitter accounts and move it out right away and it gets circulated very widely in a very short period of time."

This does not necessarily mean that Aiello is disagreeing with Mark Cuban on the value of Twitter. As I noted in November 2009, Cuban made a point of noting that Twitter does NOT compete with the more traditional news services, and that Twitter is often used to include a link to a much longer piece. Perhaps both Cuban and Aiello are right - Twitter is a good conveyance for a link to a longer article, but to get that link out, you need Twitter to do it. To prove that, here's a tweet from Greg Aiello:

Enough about everone else. What about me? RT @SyossetPatch: Greg Aiello goes from Syosset Advance writer 2 NFL PR VP: http://patch.com/A-31W

Note that if Aiello decides to charge people who quote five or more words, from his tweets, he won't make that much money - Twitter can't handle a lot of words.

Aiello's Twitter account, by the way, is @gregaiello. Maller's is @benmaller. (Maller's tweet about Aiello is here.) Mark Cuban's is @mcuban. The AP's account is @ASSOCIATEDPRESS (yes, it's in ALL CAPS - you may snicker now).