Why papers are leaving the Associated Press
Josh Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab interviewed Ron Royhab, editor of the Toledo Blade, about the origins of the Ohio News Organization, an cooperative for sharing content among dailies across the state.
As papers shink and their dependence upon wire copy diminishes, they find they can’t pull back or save money on their membership in the AP, Royhab says.
The Blade, for an example, which is a medium-sized paper, was paying $550,000 a year for the Associated Press.
And the Associated Press was forcing us to buy new services that we didn’t need or didn’t use, because everything was in the package. And we started talking about that. And we felt that we ought to write a letter to the Associated Press, and all eight of the editors and their publishers would sign the letter.
And this is what we did, and we wrote a letter to Tom Curley, who’s the chief executive for the Associated Press, and said that “You’re too expensive, your structure is wrong. The newspaper industry created you, you have an obligation to help us through this crisis now, and instead you continuously raise our rates and charge us for pictures” — if we call the AP and want a photograph of Ronald Reagan in Cleveland in the 1980s, they would charge us fees for that to get it out of their archive. And there were many other complaints we had. We write the stories, they pick them up, they chop them down and send them out on the wire as Associated Press stories.
And we just felt it was time to shake things up. So the response from the AP was to meet with us, so Tom Curley and the executive editor — her name will come to me, I just forgot her name for a second — came down to see us. And the editors of the papers and the two executives from the Associated Press. And they were very hostile toward us. Matter of fact, Tom Brettingen, who is the senior vice president, said, “You know, the newspaper industry only pays 30 percent of the income of the Associated Press, and other 70 percent subsidizes your 30 percent. And they dismissed all of our concerns out of hand.
And when the meeting ended, we kind of sat there looking at each other saying: “This is nuts!” You know, what else could we do?
So they created the Ohio News Organization.
Royhab feels like they’re on to something — something that will serve readers and member papers much better than the AP does these days. The only real drawback, according to Royhab:
The Associated Press is the only viable place you can get agate for your sports pages. And they won’t let us buy it by itself. So we are in the market now looking to see where we could get it.
The interview is lengthy but it describes very well the rationale behind the increasing trend of content sharing — how it affects newspapers and why it’s not bad for readers.
March 10th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
As Weird Al Yankovic would say: “stick it in your pointy ears!”
What’s it tell you when a newspaper even thinks a news service is all wrong. The AP should be running scared and changing.
Really, if the AP were smart, they would put their content out a la carte for everyone to buy, not just newspapers. They should create a distribution software that people can buy news from and then they should charge newspapers to put their stuff on it for pay while news orgs slowly lessen the amount of free content on their sites.
If they were smart.