Can a newspaper survive without the Associated Press?

What would the Star-News look like without stories provided by the Associated Press?

That’s the focus of a piece on the Editor & Publisher website, which details how AP’s new rate structure has many publishers looking elsewhere for sources of news. The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., for example, published its entire Sept. 10 issue “without AP, using a combination of local staff, non-AP news services, and PA Sports Ticker, a growing sports outlet that has already signed on with New York’s Daily News to provide sports coverage.”

Other publications are using Politico, the political website that recently launched a content-sharing arrangement with several newspapers. Additional sources include McClatchy-Tribune, Hearst, and the Star-News’s other favorite, The New York Times News Service.

It’s no secret that the demise of the daily newspaper is occurring before our eyes. I wonder what the Star-News has up its sleeve to stave off not only irrelevancy but extinction. For starters, its website — a certain link to the future — needs drastic improvement.

You can view the entire E&P story here:

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003872622

This entry by Ranald was posted on Friday, October 10th, 2008 and is filed under Essays, Feature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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One Response to “Can a newspaper survive without the Associated Press?”

  1. Ian on October 10th, 2008 at 9:55 am

    Interesting, Ranald. I think this dovetails with some moves on AP’s part. I was reading yesterday — can’t remember where now — about a project/experiment the Associated Press is itself involved in to create more of a…”retail” news outlet:

    They are creating news stories that aren’t meant to be simply syndicated — sucked into some newspaper and further interpreted, commented upon, contextualized, and so on. They are creating news stories for AP readers, in other words, in addition to the regular AP “consumers”.

    So their tone changes, the amount of detail, the references to other stories. And this is obviously because so many internet users now look for and go to the “source” rather than relying on some intermediary.

    RE: SNO: I actually like the new layout of the online Star News. It’s tons better than the old stuff.

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