What Changes in Who's Using AP Wires Tell Us About the News Business Now

Looking closely at the moves by Gannett, McClatchy and the Texas Tribune

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

The story of the business crisis of the press, which is the central subject of this newsletter, has, in significant measure, been the story of the fate of our nation’s newspapers—and the enterprises that have risen to succeed them. One bellwether of the state of our newspapers has long been the fortunes of the Associated Press, the newspaper cooperative that was founded in the 1840s and that remains one of the largest news organizations in the world.

This week I want to spotlight three developments last month at AP, and to reflect a bit on what they tell us about the changing shape of the news business.

Goings and Comings

First came the news that Gannett, once a robust newspaper chain but now well along in the process of being hollowed out and milked unto death by its hedge fund owners, would drop AP news, ostensibly in favor of content sharing from its own atrophying newsrooms. Then another increasingly ghostly chain, McClatchy, followed suit—without even pretending that its own efforts could provide a replacement for readers, especially at the level of state coverage. Finally came an interesting counter-move, the announcement of a content sharing deal between AP and the Texas Tribune, with AP stories from around Texas to begin supplementing the Tribune’s own reporting, while AP offers Tribune content to its remaining members in the state.

There’s a good bit to unpack here. We can, and briefly will, look at what this means for each of the players involved, but I’m much more interested in what it means for readers, and for the news business generally.

It’s not your grandfather’s AP

For Gannett, and even more so for McClatchy, this is mostly just more of the endless cost-cutting. Gannett claims that its remaining network— even as it continues to close papers, talk about giving others away and lay off staff at the rest— can provide coverage from around the country for local products, but this ignores what I would call the “here’/”there” problem.

That stems from local stories written for local audiences referring to events in a community as occurring “here,” with all sorts of local references and understandings. When such stories are republished in distant towns, the local events instead occurred “there,” and all those references need to be explained or trimmed. That requires strong copy editing, precisely one of the capabilities Gannett and McClatchy have been systematically gutting.

What’s really happening with these moves, beyond the cost cuts, is something that I have actually encouraged—local papers becoming more local, dropping much of the national and international news widely available elsewhere. In news holes that are getting smaller, especially as advertising continues to collapse, that may be wise from a business standpoint, even if it marginally fosters parochialism and ignorance of the wider world, particularly among the relatively few remaining print readers. The timing ahead of a critical election is not great for promoting an informed electorate, but could help these local outlets limit the effects of news avoidance, which seems a phenomenon rooted in national rather than local news.

For AP, all of the announcements serve to underline how far it has moved away from its roots in the newspapers which still control its governance. Thus, it’s significant that Gannett and McClatchy probably have already or will eventually actually withdraw from the AP cooperative. Unlike the short-term defection from AP of the Tribune papers from 2013-15, these moves seem likely to endure.

Even before the moves, the AP Board included three former Gannett executives (including the Board chair), but no current ones. Newspapers, AP said more than a year ago, account for less than 10% of its revenues, which come instead mostly from video and other licensing, much of it global. Its CEO, Daisy Veerasingham, named to her post in 2021, is the first in that role not to come from the newspaper business, having joined AP in global TV sales. In the longer run, AP probably somehow needs to better align its governance with its business model, which could be an interesting space to watch.

Meanwhile, in Texas

The Texas Tribune deal may be the most interesting of the three announcements, even though it has received the least national attention and no money is changing hands. It reflects a recognition of how much the news landscape is evolving, and where the future of content sharing may lie. It is remarkable, for instance, at least in my view, that the Tribune currently has five political reporters at the Statehouse in Austin to AP’s one. It will be interesting to see, as AP continues to move away from its newspaper base (and vice versa), if similar arrangements emerge elsewhere. I expect they will.

At the same time, emerging local and regional powers like the Tribune get significant potential benefit from being able to rely on the AP’s continuing robust and reliable editing capacity to, for instance, offer truncated versions of their own stories in a manner that may yield much wider distribution for their work. One other interesting place to watch will be Gannett’s Austin American-Statesman, now deprived of AP copy and having already eliminated its own desk at the Statehouse in its home town. Will its hedge fund owners redeploy some of the money they have saved from not paying AP to reinstate that desk, or perhaps instead rely on (full-length) Tribune coverage, to which it has free access?

While wire services occasionally do great investigative work, most of what they produce is decidedly unsexy— it’s the meat and potatoes of news. But you can learn a lot from the staples any group chooses to consume, or to publish. The changes in and around the AP, as it continues to move away from the newspapers that used to represent its core, reveal a great deal about where the news business writ large is heading, I think. It’s a more entrepreneurial future, one with more complex business models and changing governance structures, one which is very much continuing to evolve. It deserves our attention.

Correction: The Texas Tribune has five political reporters at the Statehouse in Austin, not six as this column originally said.