My paper's dropping the AP wire - has yours?

Awful. But awfully funny.

(Yeah, yeah, I'm a dick.)

 

I'm always uncomfortable rewriting news releases. I do them, of course, but not like others at our place do. I spend as much time as possible to include whatever "news" is actually in it, but more important to me is to find two or three (or more) details the reader might not know by the time it runs in our paper. My goal is to make our story or brief be so dissimilar to the news release -- while still presenting the "news" -- that nobody would ever guess the release was the primary source material for our brief.

A nearby college recently hired a coach, and I turned their 43-inch release into a 12-inch story that had many of his biographical details in a different order. His connections to the conference our main college, his place in a junior college hierarchy that included a former coach at our main college -- things like that, which I deemed of more interest to our readers than much of the rest of the story. I wonder if Cadet's staff will have the time for any thoughtful, meaningful rewrites. That press release from the hospital about bottle rockets is a good starting point, but I'd gag if all we did at our paper was change a word here and there and basically run it as is.

Maybe I go overboard, but the day I have to look a reader in the eye and admit to running press releases verbatim or almost verbatim from schools and other organizations is the day I feel I have less reason to encourage them to buy the paper. Yes, we have plenty of content that is driven by our own ideas and enterprise, but I don't ever want a reader to think, "You know, if this story and that story and that story is a press release from the hospital, the school, the police jury, maybe I should just bookmark all the Web sites of the local entities and check them every day!"

I know it's an extreme case, but I think we distinguish ourselves by doing our own reporting and work, and when we can't, we plug in AP with things we can't cover first-hand. I find it hard to believe AP simply cranks out rewritten press releases on a lot of subjects. I'd like to believe whoever has to do the rewrite puts some effort into it and makes a call or two looking for the rest of the story. Maybe I'm spoiled by our AP crew around here, which I think does a good job. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd like to think even at our worse we're more than a one-stop shop of collected news releases, a Reader's Digest for P.R. spin. Maybe that's the road we're headed down because of budget cuts.

Can't believe this publisher thinks this is smart.

 

Hell, one of our news reporters has made a living off rewriting press releases. That's 90 percent of his copy. At least they started making him get fresh quotes.

 

Really this argument comes down to what type of paper and the location of it is.

My paper owns 3 weeklies, one weekly mag/insert and one twice weekly all in really small towns...(the mag goes to all of them)

No AP at all, no wire. None needed. Community simply doesn't care for it. Most get the Big paper from the city which is 50 mins away and then our paper too. Our circulation is a little more than the town's population.

We provide the local news, the Big paper can provide the rest. It is pretty much the same as the Big City paper owning a lot of smaller ones, and you can get a subscription to both.

We just had a national event take place sort of, and we were fine with the staff we have.

1 Sports Editor (yours truly), a couple part-time sports reporters (they cover the 2 of the weeklies schools - of course they covered nothing during the event), three news reporters, one community editor, our executive editor, NO photographers!! We do have some people on small contracts who take photos but they only do it at their convenience. On occasion we have an intern.

Thats it.

I've had to write 19 stories in one week to fill up 9 or so pages with minimal ads. Wire would be nice to have so I don't have to kill myself like that, but I think my section is better for it. We are a two high school town and I cover every single sport at both of them - although the middle school stuff and some JV stuff doesn't make the cut.

If something falls through, I run a picture with a jump. Without wire, I sometimes have lots of pictures with my jumps, but I am fine with that. The locals here like the pictures more than the stories anyway - I think reading is hard for some of them or maybe it's just my terrible writing.

 

I feel your pain, Cadet, but perhaps you or someone else can answer this question: How much money is the newspaper saving by dropping AP, anyway?

I've heard that the subscription rates are based on a newspaper's circulation and which version of the wire is used, but does anyone here have any ballpark figures as to what a newspaper spends?

For all the reasons already mentioned, and even though AP has its flaws, I've heard that AP is a good buy for a newspaper.

 

To wit: My shop uses a wire service put out by the big name J-school in my area. Of course, that means it's only available during the fall and spring semesters. If I've got spacekill during the breaks between semesters and a shorthanded staff, I'm SO fuckin L.

However, I am proud to say that before I got to my shop, it lived or died by that wire service. It ran 182 stories by that wire service in the academic year before I got there. Over roughly the same time period this past academic year, I had that number cut to 21. Even one of the flacks for our local state's attorney noticed the difference.

When I came on board, the paper averaged five wire stories per week. Since I came on board, that average dropped to one every other week.

Of course, I supplement that with very liberal use of college student interns. The upshot is that means there's much MUCH more local copy in my paper.

 

As a former staffer of the Bakersfield Californian, where I designed frequently after the redesign, I say YES you can dogleg photos (whether the photogs like it or not!!!)!