In case you missed it, the AP’s Twitter account was suspended yesterday afternoon after the fake tweet — possibly posted by the Syrian army — caused a temporary shock to stock markets, which rely on news wires like the AP for up-to-date information.

On Wednesday morning, the AP announced its Twitter feed had returned and began tweeting ordinary news items (though initially forgetting to delete the hoax tweet):

The @AP Twitter account, which was suspended after being hacked, has been secured and is back up. Thank you for your patience. – @EricCarvin—
The Associated Press (@AP) April 24, 2013

Most of the account’s followers, however, appear to have disappeared. At the time of the hacking incident, the AP had nearly 2 million followers:

As of Wednesday morning at 9:30 ET, however, the AP account had fewer than 100,000 followers:

I’ve asked the AP for an explanation and am still waiting on a response. At this point,Twitter may be adding the followers back gradually; the 85,454 figure is almost double the number from earlier this morning.

Update: The AP says its social media editor ”was told by Twitter that it can take up to 24 hours for the follower count of a suspended account to return to normal.”

If the followers have indeed been wiped out, this would represent a serious blow for the AP. Like other news organizations, the AP relies heavily on social media outlets to disseminate its stories, and an organization’s (or person’s) number of Twitter followers can stand as proxy for influence.

The AP hacking incident has also led to calls for Twitter to introduce a security feature known as 2-step authentication.

Twitter has since suspended the account and the AP issued the following statement: “Advisory: @AP Twitter account has been hacked. Tweet about an attack at the White House is false. We will advise more as soon as possible.”

The episode shows again, as it did during the Boston tragedy, the mischief that can occur as a result of huge number of people instantly relaying false information through false tweets. The Anonymous hacker news account, for instance, saw its reporting of the message retweeted almost 500 times:

Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured via @AP—
Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) April 23, 2013

In the last year, Twitter has become an essential news source not only for news outlets but for the financial community. This month, Bloomberg incorporated Twitter feeds into its terminals while the SEC gave companies the green light to use it for relating market moving news.

Update: The AP has since issued this tweet from a separate account associated with its political news outlet:

All, AP's Twitter accounts will be suspended until we can be assured of their security. Do not respond to any news posted by these accounts.—
AP Politics (@AP_Politics) April 23, 2013

In a partnership announced on Tuesday, AP said it will offers its customers a “curated collection of premium, culturally relevant music” via its AP Images service. The offering amounts to an online jukebox of sorts for ad agencies, publishers or even individual consumers who are looking for licensed music to accompany pictures, movies or slide shows.

The music is supplied by indie musicians who have licensed their songs to Audiosocket in the hopes of gaining new revenue and exposure. Blake Sell, product director of AP Images, says the service fills a middle ground by offering high quality audio files without the trouble or expense of licensing famous names.

The partnership is another in a series of deals that make AP look less like a traditional news service and more like a general content broker. The organization has recently signed deals with creative photography outfit Corbis and with celebrity image shop Invision. Meanwhile, the AP is also offering its content to more non-news organizations like ad agencies and sports leagues.

(Image by Radoman Durkovic via Shutterstock)

The Style

Credit where credit’s due, the AP designers got it right. The updated apps offer a pretty, collage-like interface that is somewhat akin to Facebook’s timeline, and the navigation is quick and intuitive. The white on grey text is easy to read and slide bars let users customize the font and headline size.

AP has bet big on visual so there are pictures everywhere on both the iPhone and iPad versions (the app will be available on other platforms later this year). The pictures look terrific with sports and entertainment stories but, as others have noted, the photos can feel busy on the smaller screen.

The interface makes it easy to quickly add or drop sections like “lifestyle” or “wacky,” and users can customize the “local” tab to include a list of different regions. Ads appear at the bottom of the screen from time to time but they are not obtrusive.

Best of all, the app loads like lightning which makes it ideal for news junkies looking for a fix on the subway or in a Starbucks (NSDQ: SBUX) line.

The Substance

This is the AP so news comes by the bucket with frequent updates. The revised apps also include a new “Big Story” feature that chains together items on topics like “2012 Presidential Race” and “March Madness.” So far, there are only four “big stories” but editors say they will add and remove topics in response to breaking news items.

As with the app’s earlier iterations, the AP’s broad reach makes it a good one-stop shop for everything from sports to politics. Major breaking stories are announced via a streaming red banner across the top of the screen.

The most intriguing feature, though, may be the apps’ extensive local coverage. Users can add different regions and toggle between them on the local tab, meaning it’s possible to quickly keep track of what’s going on in Boston and Boise. Except for New York City which is fed by AP, the local coverage is culled from regional papers like the San Jose Mercury News and the Casper Star Tribune and curated by local editors. In some small areas, the process appears to be still under construction; some papers display a “no content available” message.

The Strategy

The new apps are good-looking and ambitious but there is still the question of how they will help the AP and its clients make money. Even if the product is good, it must still stand out against mobile offerings from rival news organizations and from personal aggregators like Flipboard and Zite.

Like its precursors, the new iOS apps are free although SVP for Digital Products, Jim Kennedy, says the AP is considering charging for deep content or adding in-app payment options in the future. For now, Kennedy says the AP is focused on executing a shift to comprehensive real time news on mobile — which is what he says is the future of news.

The deeper collection of local news is a boon for consumers but also raises the question of cannibalization. If users can read the Idaho Statesman through an AP app, will they still go to the Statesman itself? Kennedy says the AP’s local offerings are not a substitute but a “great complement to local apps.” He adds that the AP apps provide local publishers “additional shelf-space and inventory.”

As for the AP itself, Kennedy says that once the mobile service reaches profitability, it will be in a position to share revenue with partners. The association says that, overall, its apps have been downloaded more than 11 million times, including 3.5 million downloads to Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) products.

Curley began his tenure in 2003 and presided over the 166-year old news cooperative’s challenging transition into the digital realm. His key initiatives included retooling the AP’s infrastructure to serve a variety of multi-meda platforms and the adoption of aggressive copyright enforcement policies.

Under Curley, the AP saw its first back-to-back revenue declines since the Great Depression as its client newspapers struggled and new competitors emerged like CNN’s wire service. The cooperative reportedly earned a profit of $8.8 million in 2009 on revenues of $676 million.

“Tom Curley was the perfect leader to guide AP through the roughest times the media industry has ever seen,” said board chairman William Dean Singleton, in a statement with the release. “He was a visionary who understood the need for AP to quickly adapt to new digital times, a transformative leader who created innovative new business opportunities for our industry and an indefatigable newsman who made sure AP remained the definitive trusted source for breaking news.”

In 2008, AP’s newspaper clients rebelled against a stiff rate increase and some like now-bankrupt Tribune Company announced they would bolt the organization altogether. After telling paidContent that editors were unfairly making the AP a “whipping boy,” the organization soon backtracked completely on the controversial rate plan.

Curley has also presided over a recent period of lay-offs and a variety of efforts to obtain better licensing deals from aggregators like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) News.

In the last two years, Curley and the AP have also garnered attention for anti-piracy initiatives such as the creation of the APNewRegistry and NewsRight, a licensing tool company in which the AP is now a minority shareholder.

Curley’s other legacies include advocating for First Amendment rights in the post-9/11 era and the expansion of the AP into new hot spots. The co-operatve has opened bureaus in Pakistan and North Korea, and won two Pulitzer prizes for photography.

The full press release is available here on the AP’s website.

From today, AP will appear as a featured content provider on Pulse’s service, which currently works on the iPad, iPhone and Android devices. Included in the service will be AP’s mainstay text-based reporting, but also photography and video content, and users will have the option of selecting all or just specific streams of AP content, such as news, business, entertainment, health, politics and sports.

Pulse tells me that this “one of the first times that AP has opened all their content to a partner (and they have very few mobile partners).” It complements AP’s own efforts to create tablet and smartphone apps for its content such as this one for the iPad.

Update: A spokesperson for AP tells me that, in fact, AP is “providing Pulse a selection of international and national news and associated images. It is a portion of AP’s total content.” So perhaps not all content after all.

Crucially, one of Pulse’s biggest competitors in the newsreading-app space, Flipboard, is featuring only a subset of the AP’s coverage. Coincidentally, Flipboard announced its own AP deal only two days ago: a special focus on the next Presidential race to the White House.

Given that AP does not have a web site that anchors and aggregates all of its content for public consumption, initiatives like this one with Pulse become all the more useful, if a little quirky: Articles that get viewed and saved in Pulse subsequently show up on Pulse web pages — normally, content viewed in the Pulse app would link to the content from the original online source.

Apropos of the Iowa Republican Caucus this week, and in keeping with its Flipboard content campaign, the AP will also be offering a special channel covering November election. Included will be real-time coverage of candidates, polls, voting results and analysis from AP journalists and its partners.

Pulse and AP are not disclosing any financial terms for this deal.

The AP began overhauling its video capabilities last November, when AP Television News started planning a “multimillion-dollar upgrade” of its video and image production. For London-based APTN, the company’s global video news agency, the revamp is considered the single biggest investment the wire service has made in it since 1998, when the AP bought its competitor, Worldwide Television News.

Competition between the AP and a variety of news services has centered around providing multimedia, as Reuters (NYSE: TRI), Bloomberg and Dow Jones (NSDQ: NWS) have placed greater emphasis on broadband video as well as supplying news to cable and broadcast outlets.

AP Entertainment Daily News, as the HD video venture is called, will cover the usual mix of celebrities, fashion, awards shows, film premieres, concerts and theater. The service runs more than 300 stories per month. AP’s Celebrity Extra, Movies Now, Film File and Entertainment Now are also available to customers in HD.

To make sure its clients stay interested, the AP will be producing a higher volume of entertainment stories on weekends, which will amount to an extra 50 minutes’ worth of weekly entertainment video.

Sports will be the next area to get the HD video treatment. That part is expected to be available in January, giving it plenty of time to get ready for the summer Olympics Games in London and the U.S. presidential elections in November. Release

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For example, if one of the AP’s news organization members has a feature on the melting polar ice cap or endangered polar bears, it might want to access to a Corbis photo that can better illustrate the story as opposed to assigning a straight news story. And for Corbis, if one of its advertising clients wants to use an archival image of a famous news event, an AP action shot is readily available.

Corbis’ rivals have also been active in finding alliances designed to make the most of their huge image libraries. For example, In addition to completing two acquisitions, Getty Images struck deals with Universal Music.

The stock photo market has grown tremendously in recent years, and the internet has provided companies with vast image libraries with an opportunity to cash in old pictures. Hence, the reason the AP had fought so strongly against what it regarded as street artist Shepard Fairey’s appropriation of an Obama campaign photo. The easy access to images on the web has also made these companies more vigilant about protecting their intellectual property. By teaming up, the AP and Corbis can introduce each other to their respective clients and make it less likely that they’ll look to alternative photo distributors.

The Corbis arrangement — financial terms are undisclosed — is the latest wide-ranging content distribution deal the AP has struck in the past few years, including deals between its photo portal, AP Images, and the NFL and the NCAA in 2009. More recently, the AP has been working with photo agency CelebrityFootage and teamed with the Press Association on video licensing.

Last month, the AP began working with talent agency/marketing firm Madison Avenue Sports and Entertainment to develop content culled from the wire service’s library of audio, video and photography. Among the first plans to come out of the partnership, MadAve will create “episodic programming” using footage from the APs archive.

“We’re continuing to look for partners who can help extend our client base and reach,” said Fernando Ferre, VP for AP Images, in an interview with paidContent. “The alliance with Corbis is an entirely new one for us and it’s very complementary. That’s the main thing we look for in these partnerships — there’s a definite focus on avoiding any duplication in what we have to offer. We’re also thinking about medicine, sports and entertainment on packaging our content for programming.”

Licensing its content is increasingly important to the AP, given the weakness of its newspaper members and the opportunity to derive new revenue from its trove of images and video. The AP has struck numerous agreements intended to mine the content in its archive with outside publishers and distributors over the past few years, including deals between AP Images and the NFL and the NCAA in 2009. More recently, the AP has been working with photo agency CelebrityFootage and teamed with the Press Association on video licensing.

The AP didn’t say where MadAve, which has produced original short- and long form programming and multiple weekly series for NBC (NSDQ: CMCSA), ABC (NYSE: DIS), CBS (NYSE: CBS), would be looking to shop the episodes around to or if it would expect a run of the show on cable, broadcast, online video or some combination of the three.

Considering the amount of content, multiple show treatments/ideas will be created and pitched. To start, MadAve and the AP will concentrate on creating short-form content and will look to expand the concepts from there.