The Associated Press Competing With Its Own Member Papers

from the future-of-news dept

This should be the last post related to last week's "Future of News" workshop. One of the panelists at the workshop was Steve Borliss, who has a new piece up arguing that the Associated Press helped turn the news business into a cartel in the 20th century. He suggests that by limiting access to the AP network, incumbent papers could prevent potential rivals from competing effectively, because no local paper could hope to replicate the AP's national and international news-gathering resources. But now, as we noted last week, the Internet is upending this cozy relationship. For one thing, people can now easily get newspapers from multiple geographic areas, and they're beginning to notice that every newspaper seems to be running a lot of the same AP stories, forcing papers to develop more original content if they want to stand out from the crowd. But more importantly, the AP itself is becoming a competitor to the newspapers. For example, after newspapers complained about Google News sending them traffic, Google signed a deal with the AP allowing it to host AP articles directly, cutting the papers out of the transaction entirely. We wondered at the time if newspapers would be upset about the loss of traffic from Google News, and now this seems to be happening, with a group of Ohio papers forming their own Ohio-centric wire service in competition with the AP. As the Internet causes media outlets to increasingly compete with one another across geographic boundaries, expect to see a lot more cases like this, where former partners become competitors.

Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: competition, internet, newspapers, wire services
Companies: associated press


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  1. identicon
    rob, 22 May 2008 @ 6:33am

    Good News

    I can only see this as a positive. More competition in the news space will hopefully lead to less bias in new coverage.

    link to this | view in thread ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.