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 makes me sad. It also encourages me to quote AP articles rather than Rueters.