The only thing that’s really made this AP-ification of local news even remotely tolerable from a consumer perspective is that the AP is good. It hires talented, principled journalists who take their mission extremely seriously. And the AP has been able to hire and sustain a lot of those journalists because they were attached to a cooperative business model that made sense.
But what if you’re Gannett CEO Mike Reed? Your publicly traded company’s survival plan in a shrinking sector is to be McDonald’s. If you aren’t getting bigger, you are dying in the hospital bed with everybody else. You already merged with one of the other largest news chains in America, GateHouse — probably destroying more journalism jobs than anybody in human history in the process — and are running out of journalism stuff to consolidate. You can’t buy the AP, since it’s a nonprofit membership cooperative serving the competitors you’ve got left. So you withdraw from being an AP member after a century-long partnership, team up with one of AP’s global wire service competitors, Reuters, and try to become a more commercially minded, financier-dominated, less democratically operated AP — by killing off AP. “The primary target customers for the offering are U.S. regional and local publishers and broadcasters,” Axios reports. Those are AP’s customers.
The Associated Press and its cooperative nonprofit structure has been one of the final pieces of the legacy news ecosystem to resist the financialization of journalism. Maybe those days are over. Gannett and Reuters’ play here is for Wall Street to move in on and capture the less savory element of AP’s business — helping local news outlets paper over the loss of local reporters with filler journalism, ironically in many of the communities that armies of laid-off Gannett journalists used to serve. […]
This really isn’t all that surprising.
I do want to set the record straight that Reed headed GateHouse before the reverse merger with Gannett (GH parent New Media Investment Group bought Gannett and took the name). I’ve worked for some inspiring leaders. I also worked for Mike Reed.
Without getting too deep into the Reeds, consolidation was always going to come for the AP. Fewer members, lower dues; we touched on this just past the election with the layoff thread. But the structure of the AP is such that while most of what you’re running comes from dedicated national beat reporters (I’m looking at you, Marcia Dunn [who’s likely retired by now]) and state bureaus, when someone goes on a rampage and holes himself up in a department store in Bumfuck, Wash., the Bumfuck Daily Bugle sends copy and art to Seattle, where it then gets moved along to members while a reporter heads to the scene.
You’re not getting that from Reuters. They’ll eventually get there should the story blow up.
This is a stupid optics decision for shareholders. What Gannett should really be doing is ripping off the Band-Aid and ceasing to run wire copy decided on in Austin on dead trees nationwide.