Newspapers without the Associated Press?
The new issue of American Journalism Review asks the question of whether making Associated Press content (which was originally created for the newspapers that were part of the AP collective) available to Internet portals was A Costly Mistake?
I didn’t need to read the article to know the answer: Duh.
But the piece does a good job of explaining why it seemed reasonable at the time to make the content available, and that no one was able to foresee the present time, when readers, quite naturally, wonder why they need to read their local paper, when they’re getting national, international, sports and entertainment news for free, well, everywhere, via the Associated Press (and, to a lesser extent, Reuters and Agence France-Presse , better known as AFP).
“If you go back in time..the conventional wisdom was, ‘Gee, this is going to be extra revenue for AP. It’s not going to hurt anything,’ ” says Hussman, who remains on the AP’s board. “There was a lot of debate on the board at the time. Some saw it as a problem, some didn’t… Well, it is a problem. It’s not that the AP [alone] is the problem. But it’s part of a bigger problem. When you give away the news, it becomes a commodity. When something becomes a commodity, you lose your pricing power. And that’s where we are today” on the Web.
This isn’t exactly how people at the AP view the matter. Jim Kennedy, one of the principal architects of the AP’s new-media efforts over the years, says the organization resisted selling to open sites for years in deference to its traditional clients. Eventually, however, resistance became futile. As the AP stood by, other news services, principally Reuters, began to establish a presence among the Web’s pioneers.
“When the Internet came along, [Reuters] was everyone’s news source,” says Kennedy, who is the AP’s vice president and director of strategic planning. “We were very concerned about that, as was the board. I suppose the objection was that we were creating other points of access to the AP news report. But it was mitigated by the fact that [online sites] had Reuters news. It was a question of substitutes. You weren’t keeping news off those Web sites. If we let Reuters have it, we would never have been able to harvest that revenue stream.”
True enough, I suppose. But really, that’s the AP’s problem. (And mine, I guess, if I ever ended up working for the AP.)
But now I’m coming at it from the opposite end: If the readers don’t need papers to provide AP content, because they can get that sort of news from radio, television and especially from the Internet, why are newspapers still paying for the content?
Even at a small newspaper, it costs tens of thousands of dollars a year to get AP content. That kind of money could be — and I would argue that readers believe should be — invested in other ways, particularly in the creation of more local news content. That’s why our readers are coming to us, after all. Local news content is the unique product we have for sale.
AP content is also used as filler to pad pages that have a funny little space that a story won’t fill or there isn’t a photo available to drop into. But newspapers have other resources to fill that space, such as content from papers owned by others under the same corporate umbrella. This is not a problem worth spending tens of thousands of dollars to solve.
Obviously, this isn’t my problem to solve — I’m an infantryman in the trenches, not a general or even a captain — but from where I stand, it surely seems like the newspaper isn’t getting a whole lot from pouring endless money into the Associated Press. The AP provides a valuable service, but let those that benefit from it most now — the online portals — pay for it, and newspapers should spend those dollars elsewhere, in ways that benefit them, and not a wire service that’s grown apart from the newspaper collective that created it.
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