Look out, Associated Press: Here comes Publish2 News Exchange.

OK, perhaps the new Web-content aggregator’s stated goal of “disrupting the Associated Press monopoly over content distribution to newspapers” is a bit lofty, but hey, might as well aim high, right?

Publish2 News Exchange announced its launch Monday at TechCrunch Disrupt at St. John’s Center Studio in New York, repeatedly stressing its goal of taking on the AP. The new system has a modest list of content partners (see graphic after jump), but it doesn’t quite match up with AP’s 3,700 employees in more than 300 global locations, not to mention its roster of affiliates.

Publish2 director of news innovation Ryan Sholin went into further detail on the Publish2 Blog:

Newspapers across the country have been trying to find ways to cancel their Associated Press contracts.

They’ve decided the AP is too expensive, too slow to deliver stories from their own states, and too unwilling to unbundle options for news organizations that are moving ahead in a Web-based world, where links, feeds, and subscriptions can be mixed, matched, and mashed up to build a newspaper full of diverse voices.

But there’s a catch.

Until now, newspapers that have tried to reduce their dependence on the AP in favor of a diverse group of news providers have faced a problem.

They haven’t been able to cobble together a diverse group of sources in a way that meets their needs on deadline.

Until now, newspapers in search of a replacement for the AP have been unable to find a platform designed to support their newsroom’s need for content delivered on deadline to their print publishing systems.

Until now.

We’ll be launching Publish2 News Exchange this week to give newspapers what they’ve been searching for: the next evolution of the newswire.

We designed Publish2 News Exchange to serve the needs of newspapers that are already sharing their stories with each other, often by email or a copy/paste routine that costs editors and page designers valuable time on deadline.

Enough of that: We’ve worked in newsrooms and watched busy city editors try to chase down stories from the paper across the state or over the hill, and then watched the night copy editors sweat until the story comes through as a barely usable e-mail attachment. It doesn’t work.

But there’s a better way, of course.

Publish2 News Exchange connects directly to print publishing systems via familiar standards and protocols, using FTP or authenticated Web feeds to import and export stories when you need them, where you need them, formatted to flow straight to the pages of tomorrow’s print edition.

Publish2 News Exchange allows online publishers what they’ve never had before: a direct line to print editions of newspapers across the world.

A diverse range of voices in tomorrow’s print edition, covering national news, politics, technology, business, personal finance, investigative reporting, sports, and much, much more.

And CEO Scott Karp added in his own post:

Today, at TechCrunch Disrupt, we’re announcing the launch of Publish2 News Exchange, a platform aimed at disrupting the Associated Press monopoly over content distribution to newspapers. With Publish2 News Exchange, newspapers can replace the AP’s obsolete cooperative with direct content sharing and replace the AP’s commodity content with both free, high-quality content from the Web and content from any paid source.

With Publish2 News Exchange, we’ve created what the AP should have become, but can’t because of a classic Innovator’s Dilemma. The New AP is an open, efficient, scalable news-distribution platform. We’re enabling newspapers to benefit for the first time from the disruptive power of the Web and from the efficiency of content production on the Web.

Publish2 News Exchange solves the problems that have prevented newspapers from creating an efficient, scalable alternative to the AP. We bridge the gap between print publishing and Web publishing by connecting natively to outdated newspaper print-publishing systems. We support the standard formats used by the AP and the technologies that newspapers already use to move content between print and Web systems. Our self-serve permissioning system enables newspapers and other publishers to distribute content to whomever they choose on whatever terms they choose.

With every revolution in production, there is a corresponding revolution in distribution. We’ve had the revolution of the blogosphere’s content production, and the corresponding revolution with search. Recently, we’ve had the revolution of demand-driven content production — e.g. Demand Media, Associated Content, Aol’s Seed — aimed at maximizing the efficient production of high-quality content.

We’re enabling newspapers to barter the value of their trusted brands and their print products, which still reach millions of news consumers, to distribute high-quality Web content in place of the AP. In exchange, publishers of high quality on the Web can build their brands in print, as the New AP. The result is a new efficient supply and distribution chain for high-quality content brands.

And high-quality content brands are the key to premium brand advertising.

It’s counterintuitive for a Web platform to be supporting print publishing. But the reality is that print publishing still drives newspaper operations, including Web publishing. To disrupt the AP now, we have to support print. While print lasts, we want to make it more like the Web: more dynamic, a richer, better product. We want to make curating high-quality content for print as easy as linking on the Web.

Our ultimate goal is to create a bridge for newspapers’ trusted brands into a digital future, positioning Publish2 News Exchange at the center of the news industry as it evolves.