Tribune Company to Drop AP?

Nah. They'll just have Randy Carlyle and Terry Murray call in their results.

 

That was my first question. I could see getting away with this from a story standpoint, but from an agate standpoint, this would be a nightmare.

 

Agate and photos would be the primary concern.

The reality is that AP has become a competitor and vicious one at that. The rates are exceedingly high and how it picks up copy has become a disaster in the internet age.
An example, guy at my shop scores an exclusive. Not a huge deal, just a nice little news scoop.
That story runs. AP picks it up, and puts it on the wire.
The story goes national because of its odd angle.
Did my my paper get credit for it?
No.
Did the competition run the story?
Yes.
Did they give us credit?
No.
Did the AP get credit for breaking the story?
Yes.
Did the AP's online partners blow the story up?
Yes.
Who got the credit?
The AP.
How does that drive traffic to our website. How does that help our circulation?
It doesn't.
That happens every day. In every state.
The Tribune company is absolutely right to challenge the AP.

 

Agate is the biggie for me, too. And photos. You're telling me the Trib papers would not have a Phillies-Astros box score? Or no photos from the Red Sox-Rays ALCS game? No Cowboys-Giants football summary? Or North Carolina-Duke hoop photos from the Final Four? Losing stories is not a problem, but MLB standings, NBA sums, PGA scores, etc., will be missed. As will photos from the Kentucky Derby, Fiesta Bowl and spring training, to name a minuscule percentage.

 

If they decide to do this, I hope a lot of big news breaks in cities far away from any Tribune papers.

 

Getty Images and US Presswire offer better quality photos than AP. Quality (and number of photos) on big events is NO problem without AP.

The drawback is that they do not cover every single pro and major college game every single night, like AP does.

I imagine papers would make deals with other papers in the city where their team is traveling for photos.

Agate? A bitch, but we have cut so much out of our paper that it is not nearly the nightmare it would have been.

Can still type in (or cut/paste) scores/summaries from other web sites. An ethical question to some degree, but how will NHL.com know if you copied a summary from their web site? And would they even care?

 

The AP doesn't have any competition.
The reality is that if enough papers challenge the AP, someone will step up and fill the gap.
Plus the state wires will suffer a dramatic loss of quality if the papers start dropping AP. The AP won't be able to pick up copy anymore. That will cause other papers to drop and the cycle will continue down.
The right media company — maybe Tribune, maybe McClatchy or maybe a startup — will get rolling to fill the gap.
Plus it would be a revenue stream in an age where you need all the revenue you can get.

 

I would think that with all of the cutbacks at papers, AP would be as strong as ever.

 

This move, if done by such a large company, will encourage others to do it, too. Perhaps there will be even more "content-sharing" going on than just within companies themselves, especially regarding information that is not considered particularly competitive, like box scores, and photos.

Or, perhaps the agate can come directly from the PR/game sources, themselves, which is how AP gets some things, itself, even when it has people out writing on events. Or, it could come from web sites, or perhaps, with certain sports, papers won't worry so much about whether they get the agate, at all.

The agate pages, like everything else, are being cut down so much, the type is so tiny that it is virtually unreadable, anyway, and information is being re-directed to the web site so often, that, in some cases, a little more of that happening probably isn't going to be seen (by the papers, anyway) as any great loss.

And, in possibly putting it on the web site, those working material for the paper probably will just say, "When we get it, we get it," put it up on the web then, or publish it as a "late" box, and not be overly concerned beyond that, because they have other things to worry about and work on.

I could be wrong in this, but I'm not sure how much agate is really seen as a priority anymore, considering cutbacks and the continually more-limited space within newspapers.

It's sad to think about this, but it's happening. People are making decisions and doing things that are less than ideal, and not what they used to do.

 

Yes, Zell certainly is.

 

Didn't a Jersey paper — maybe the Star Ledger — do a day without AP as an experiment?
Can anyone here report on how it went?

 

very nicely done