spokane: we want out -- now!

four papers have notified they want to drop ap -- including spokane, which wants out in 30 days.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003840644

spokane sports deskers, polish your resumes.

 

If they can get out in 30 days, AP is in deep shit with this precedent.

 

I'm sure the lawyers can do some fancy footwork on either side so we will see.

And why would the deskers need to polish the resumes?

Wouldn't this mean less money the paper is essentially handing to the AP? Wouldn't this mean Spokane would need more in house content? More sidebars, illustrations, stories and pictures from their staff?

Also is this AP backlash what the newspaper needs right now? I just read about that small Idaho paper not wanting AP anymore, but if enough newspapers do this, it might save some jobs.

 

And there it is right in the story.

"The money we save will help me preserve local staff jobs."

 

there are other wire services out there for news copy (reuters, et al) that do an ok job of covering the u.s., news- and business-wise. but sports? hell no.

do i want to be sitting there rewriting stories off a web site or another wire service for inclusion in my paper? no. what is spokane gonna use as a centerpiece on c1 on some lazy, late july day, legion baseball or ultimate frisbee?

 

I don't think stories are the problem, I'm thinking agate is the problem.

They can get random features from the other wires, but as far as I know only the AP provides all-encompassing agate.

 

Knowing the Spokane staff, probably ultimate frisbee.

;D

 

It doesn't completely surprise me that the SR would try this. And, I'd bet, the sports desk drastically reduces/cuts non-local agate in the process... I'd be interested in hearing more of the internal conversations/debates they had on this, though, especially from Steve Smith and the SE Joe Palmquist.

 

people still want a baseball page. my paper is a fraction of spokane's size, yet we still run a full baseball page every day.

could that space be better-used? possibly, depends on whom you ask. would there be a mini-revolt from subscribers if we dropped it? probably.

 

Why should papers pay that much for AP when the wire service is letting Google post it immediately.

 

I'd rather be rewriting stories off the web for the paper than sitting at home looking through the help wanted ads in the paper that just laid me off.

 

There are a bunch of things you could do with this. Pay a stringer $30 to sit there for a few hours and write 15 quick baseball briefs. Have him make a little sidebar about the day's best and worst performance and use it to supplement the in-house coverage. No stringers? Pay a desker to do it, instead of laying him off because the company is spending $400,000 for the same articles that every other newspaper in America is running.