AP losing newspaper membership

By Austin Bates

Recently, the Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, among other newspapers, announced Thursday that, in two years time, it would end its contract with the AP, from whom it gets wire services from. Other companies have announced or considered similiar moves, but none as prominent, apparently, as the Tribune Company.

This got me to thinking about what the AP's future might be. Currently, the AP, among other duties, offers wire services, multi-media content, and national sports teams coverage. Non-contributing members of the AP have to pay fees to use this material, and this seems to be the chief reason why some papers are ending their contracts (the two year notice to the AP is actually required by contract).

In another report, AP's Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll pointed out that while the Tribune Company ending their contract is worrisome, this is not the first newspaper to leave the AP. Most cases have been confidential before, though.

In any case, the profit downturn for newspapers seems to be the driving force behind some of them leaving, seeking to cut costs by ending the fees some have to pay.

By all accounts, the newspapers that are leaving will do more harm to themselves than to the AP, as the AP is looking to move toward more profitable ventures in the changing landscape of journalism, and newspapers in general are still struggling with this issue.

The AP, by its nature, has more news information, more media, from more spots, more completely than any single newspaper could hope to have, since the AP is a coalition of newspapers contributing to a central source. Apparently, some of the newspapers, with the changing percentage of actual news in their papers, are seeing the AP's services as less and less important.

Still, in the end, I wonder if the newspapers won't come back to the AP several years from now, hoping to remedy a continually decreasing level of profit. I see the AP as continuing to go strong, by the blessing of sheer mass of information and services, while individual newspapers who shun the AP's services could be "left out in the cold", figuratively speaking. I know that, considering the AP is the heart of many news feed services, the writer of the book on standard newspapers style writing, and has been around since the mid-19th century, I wouldn't readily leave their services behind.