Gannett and McClatchy will stop using the Associated Press. That may not seem like a big deal to people who don’t bleed machine press ink. But it’s actually pretty huge. Long overdue. Good for the business of news. Good for journalism. And good for people who want news.
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AP is syndication service. They cover the world. A friend of a friend is a biggish wig there. A while back, he explained his business to me like this, “If there’s a cricket match in Hyderabad, we know about it, write about it, and get the story to every newspaper in the world.” Like, say, Gannett’s Southwest (Florida) News-Press.
Here’s the thing. Very few people who read the News-Press care about that score. Folks who want that score go to other sites to get that news. None of which are the local paper for southwest Florida.
Yes, that’s an extreme case. But the same holds for almost all news. Want political news — Politico. Sports — ESPN. Business — Wall Street Journal. The best news is available to everyone, everywhere, always.
In a pre-digital era, your local news (paper) had to bring you the world. Blah, blah, blah, printed space was finite, editors had to make hard editorial choices.
None of that holds anymore. We curate our own world. I don’t start my day with a coffee cup near my copy of the New York Times or even their digital edition. Their editorial scope — as broad as it is — doesn’t match all my consumption wants.
So, like a lot of people, I’ve set up ingestion engines. The people I follow on Twitter and LinkedIn surface stuff I read from dozens of places everyday. Friends of mine use Apple News and Google alerts.
None of this is news. We covered this here and here and here and in a bunch of other stories.
Sidebar… you may hear that Gannett and McClatchy syndicate content from across their own network. That’s true. Gannett owns the Detroit Free Press. Maybe Freep will produce car stories for other Gannett papers. But that’s not the big story.
This is. Syndication lost a lot of its value in an infinite world of instant channels.
If Gannett and McClatchy stand by what they’ve said… that they’ll take the money they’re paying AP and shovel it back into local news, that’s great. It means local newsrooms will produce more local news for locals. That’s good for journalism, journalists, and consumers. And, it might be the first good news I’ve heard for the business of news in a long while.
Press. On.