Trib to be "AP Free" Next Week

My AP bureau is now in the single digits, after being in the high teens roughly five years ago.
About half the daily local report are pickups from papers and TV.
In no way does AP provide the same level of coverage it used to, but the price is higher and papers are losing revenue because of the Yahoos and Googles of the world are running wire copy. Wire copy that is, in at least part, generated by the papers losing revenue.
In the online world AP is a competitor and media companies are realizing that.
The smart business is to cripple the competition.
If papers can show that it can work without AP, and they will, because it can be done. Then AP is suddenly very vulnerable.
It makes me sad. My dad did work for AP. I get, or at least used to get, some cash from AP for various things.

 

Why don't people understand that just because you drop AP content doesn't mean you can't use other wires to get national news, like NFL games or whatever?

 

USA Today doesn't use AP. Have any of you seen boxes and statistics in that paper?
(rhetorical)

 

Gonna take a little creativity to make it work, but a little creativity is what we need.

Right now because of smaller sections and story and page sharing, we are using only the smallest fraction of what actually comes across the AP wire.

Why pay for 10,000 files a day when your paper may actually use only 30?

 

I bet deskers will love writing roundups and brief packages from boxes and press releases.

 

Yeah, I want to see how they do NFL, FBC, NBA and NHL roundups without using AP.

Is this just the Chicago Tribune or the whole chain?

 

The same could be said of most newspapers and even if the local bureau is down to single digits it still has more staffers than any other news service in your state. The difference becomes exponential as the circle widens to national and international coverage.

Let's also not forget that the AP is a cooperative of newspapers and run by a board comprised of newspapers. If newspapers are so upset about the way AP does business perhaps it's time they stopped letting their tail wag them.

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/nl/2009-11-02-3447725894_x.htm

 

Anybody using TSN in lieu of AP agate?

http://www.editorsweblog.org/multimedia/2009/01/us_sports_network_to_provide_newspaper_c-print.html

 

The whole chain.

 

Calling the Trib "AP Free" next week is a misnomer at best and misleading at worst.

I wouldn't say my paper was "CNS free" when I was there, even when I'd go six weeks without running wire copy.

 

Thanks for your insight. Now, go check the paper.
Tribune websites will be unaffected, just like Rosethal's story stated.
(For boxes and statistics, which is the main concern in a sports section, USA Today uses The Sports Network.)

 

I have heard nothing about this.