Oct092008
Preparing for a post-AP era
Filed under Editorial, Transparency by damon kiesow at 6:12 pm
This first appeared as Dave Solomon’s column in the October 2008 edition of the New England Press Association Bulletin.
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David Solomon is vice president for news of The Telegraph of Nashua, N.H., and its sister newspapers at the Cabinet Press Inc., based in Milford, N.H.
When members of the New England Newspaper Association gathered for their annual Newspaper of the Year luncheon in March, the judges had many positive things to say about New England newspapers.
One criticism they agreed on, however, was the general lack of attention paid to selecting and editing wire stories.
The judges complained that world and nation news from The Associated Press seemed to be relegated to “filler” status in many of the dailies. One judge commented: “After personnel and newsprint, wire services and syndicates are my third highest expense. I would think more care and attention would be put to that resource.”
Their observation is right on, and I think it reflects the shifting priorities of newspapers that I described in last month’s column. Editors are not paying enough attention to how wire stories are used because, quite frankly, it’s not high on their priority list right now.
We are focused on providing the news our readers cannot get anywhere else, and connecting them to each other for discussion and debate on those issues. The world and nation stories that make up the bulk of the AP report are available to our readers in many other venues in a more timely fashion. By the time we publish a wire story, it has already been updated several times online.
Given the shrinking news hole many of us are experiencing, we are using less and less AP content, and paying more and more for the privilege. The Telegraph recently moved from a four-section to a two-section format, loaded with local news in the front section. As a result, we are now using only the top two or three world/nation stories of the day, along with a package of briefs.
The rest of our AP content on a typical weekday consists of two or three business stories, a small stock listing, coverage of professional sports, lottery results, and some celebrity news. We use more in our Sunday edition, especially in technology, travel and education sections. Our use of AP content, however, hardly justifies the $131,000-a-year cost, especially not when we’ve been losing reporter and editor positions.
Editors asked AP to develop a new cost structure that would enable us to purchase smaller packages at much lower prices, consistent with our reduced space and reduced interest in AP content.
What we got instead was a two-tiered plan with an offer to get less than what we are now getting for about $129,000 or an opportunity to pay more ($134,000) and get much more than we use now, and much more than we’ll ever need.
We could use some of the AP copy to flesh out the world and nation report on our Web site, but AP forbids newspapers from posting any AP material not previously published by the same newspaper in print.
Meanwhile, AP deals with “pure play” sites such as Google, Yahoo and MSN ensure that all AP copy is available online long before it can be published in our newspapers. This is not a criticism of AP as a news-gathering organization. William Dean Singleton, chief executive officer of MediaNews Group and chairman of the AP Board, said in a recent interview that “AP has become the whipping boy for an angry bunch of editors who want to blame somebody for their woes.”
That’s not the case at all. I certainly don’t blame AP. I just think they’ve become way overpriced for the value offered, especially for small newspapers, and have been overconfident in their monopoly. Many newspapers throughout the nation have given AP notice, and more come on board every day.
The prospect of leaving AP was once so daunting that the monopoly was invulnerable. That’s no longer the case. As more newspapers give notice, more options will evolve in the two years it takes to get out of the AP contract.
That would be April 2010 for The Telegraph. Newspapers in several states are already sharing stories to make up for the weak AP statewide report. Several New Hampshire dailies have had an open copy exchange for more than a decade, and are making better use of it every day.
There are many supplemental services, such as Washington Post/Los Angeles Times, or New York Times News Service, that come at a fraction of the price – only $400 a month or so for a paper the size of The Telegraph. If those services became more timely with breaking news, they would be an adequate substitute for a paper of our size.
There are a la carte photo services such as Getty, online services for sports agate, lotteries, weather, and many other AP staples.
At The Telegraph, we believe entrepreneurial journalists, many displaced in the current economy, will see an opportunity.
The large dailies in New England would do well to pool their professional sports coverage and syndicate it for the smaller players.
It won’t be easy, and there are many unanswered questions, but life is possible without the Associated Press, and the potential savings are too good to overlook as journalism retools in the digital age.
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