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Tomorrow's News:
The Associated Press Gears Up for the Future of
Journalism |
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8 December
2003 |
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Born on the telegraph wires of the 19th
century, the Associated Press is readying itself for the
future at the
dawn of the 21st century via its
recently announced eAP initiative for infrastructure.
Its member news organizations can hardly wait, but by the
time it's done 30 months from now, how many of them will be
around to take advantage of it? In the rapidly changing
world of news aggregation, AP must consider how much to
cater to its existing constituencies and how much to tool
itself for a world that increasingly bypasses traditional
news outlets for its content. Given that it was the first
virtual news organization, perhaps it's ready to take some
significant steps forward. |
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The
Associated Press
is one of those venerable institutions that is ubiquitous and
oftentimes essential but just as often taken for granted. It is
by its own estimate the world's largest news organization, with
thousands of contributing reporters throughout more than 200
countries producing a 24x7 stream of text, video and audio
content for more than 15,000 news and media outlets, but except
for its byline mentions this not-for-profit cooperative may not
register in the minds of many audiences as a potent media
presence. The good news is that the AP leverages that neutral
image to publish huge quantities of objective journalism
produced by its member news organizations and its own
reporters, helping local news organizations hold down their
editorial costs. The bad news is that while its editorial and
distribution capabilities remain highly valued, the "big wire"
approach to news distribution that gave birth to the modern AP
organization has been losing its competitive edge in the
Internet era. AP's
recently announced eAP initiative is an effort to bring
modern content management methods into their operations, but
according to AP's new CEO Tom Curley, it's more than two years
from completion.
As if to underline this dilemma,
Louis D. Boccardi, the recently retired
President and CEO of AP,
spoke recently as part of the Corporate Strategies and
Insights Forum at
Sacred
Heart University. Lou conveyed a warm and thoughtful
retrospective of how journalism had progressed in his tenure at
AP but a somewhat clouded view of its future. The importance of
journalistic integrity for the future of news remains a high
priority on his list - he is helping to champion the
Associated Press Managing Editors' First Amendment Fund -
but his realistic picture of news content as a business is
dominated by overwhelming technical changes and flat ad
revenues for most of the news organizations that make up its
membership. In the meantime, in spite of the Web
providing an efficient distribution and research mechanism, the
job itself does not get any easier: according to Boccardi, 51
journalists have died worldwide to date in 2003. If the
journalism students in the audience hadn't folded their
rose-colored glasses in the face of this picture, they're
awfully optimistic.
Where does a pure news organization like
AP, born on the wires and facing the wireless era, go from
here? A few ideas come to mind:
- Rethink the membership network.
AP's core is its member news organizations: it's the original
content "give to get" model, with members contributing to
AP's editorial stream and pulling off wire stories to fill
their pages. But as papers and other news outlets continue to
trim back on their editorial staffs, more of the burden is
likely to fall on AP's own news bureaus to fill the news gap.
With the increasing preponderance of Web outlets offering
original, high-quality news targeted at both local and
widespread audiences and the continuing slump in paper
revenues, it's likely that a rebounding economy is going to
funnel many of those talented j-school graduates into
non-traditional news outlets. This is quite a pinch to
manage. To maintain high standards of journalistic quality,
it may be necessary for AP to adapt its membership strategy
to this changing environment and consider how to attract more
Web providers and talented independent online journalists
into their fold. In some ways, given that they were the first
virtual news organization, AP may be the most logical
framework for many of these providers.
- Leapfrog the mindset, not just the
technology. The eAP initiative sounds like a fine
collection of capabilities to bring AP content creation and
distribution into the present, making it far easier to bring
specific content quickly and contextually into a clients'
news organization or portal. Unfortunately, given that it's
going to be at least 30 months in the making, it's not clear
that the organization that CEO Curley describes as having
been "in the telegraph business for more than 100 years" is
going to be able to adapt from a "firehose" mentality to a
contextual news model so easily. Modernization is essential,
but the editorial functions required to leverage that
technology may have to evolve at least as much as the
technology does. In a world that is as much about
understanding the news that specific markets need in
real-time as it is about getting it to those markets in
real-time, listening to audiences will have to become an
integral part of this process.
- Consider the Google factor.
While the rapid evolution of Google News is not yet
sounding the death knell for traditional news aggregation, it
certainly raises some powerful questions about what it means
to provide objective compilation of quality news sources in a
world that no longer relies on specialized feeds to provide
news aggregation. Algorithms are not a replacement for a
senior editor's insight, but if search engines and other
non-centralized aggregation technologies compiling news in
XML format from multiple sources start getting recognized
beats, then some underlying assumptions about AP's business
model could come under fire. Being able to provide a mark of
quality in a disaggregated editorial world is at the core of
AP's value, but to get this core value to shine in the future
will require looking beyond traditional aggregation models
altogether and to help individual outlets to create and
distribute content effectively without relying entirely on a
centralized distribution model.
Probably the best news of all in
pondering the future of AP is that its role as a pure news
organization dedicated to objective virtual news sourcing
probably places it in a better position to exploit many of the
emerging trends in journalism than its circulation-bound
members. To do so may require them to look beyond that existing
membership, but if those members are on the wane, it's probably
in their best interests to do so. The future belongs to the
most open and objective news solutions available, and AP can
position itself rather handily in that space as a leader - if
they play their cards right.
-
John Blossom
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