Another crack in the foundation of American journalism appeared last week, adding to concerns about citizens becoming less and less informed.
Two of the nation’s largest newspaper publishers, Gannett and McClatchy, disclosed they are curtailing use of The Associated Press.
The news was deflating but not surprising, if you’ve talked to local-news executives about their financial situation and growing frustrations with the AP.
Debt-burdened chains, and smaller publishers trying to navigate economic and technical disruptions, have been trimming news for years and wire services are a significant expense.
Even so, this marks a turn for the worse for local newspapers and the tens of millions of people who still depend on them to provide a comprehensive bundle of the day’s news.
“You’re not only cutting off the access of communities who have access only to Gannett newspapers, to all of that incredibly vital reporting, you’re also potentially weakening this really core piece of our news infrastructure,” said Nic Dawes, a veteran publisher now executive director of New York digital news outlet The City.
It’s especially troubling that publishers serving a large swath of the country are cutting a primary provider of international and national reporting in an election year.
As the AP reported in January, Americans are increasingly concerned about international issues and immigration as wars rage overseas.
Yet last Tuesday, The Wrap reported that Gannett will cease using AP on Monday, though it will use Reuters wire stories. This affects approximately 220 daily and weekly publications in 43 states, including The Kitsap Sun.
McClatchy simultaneously informed editors it would stop using AP, except for election results, after March 31. It publishes 30 dailies including papers in Bellingham, Olympia, Tacoma and the Tri-Cities.
Publishers have long grumbled about the cost and rigid subscription policies of the AP, a nonprofit publishers’ cooperative formed in 1846 that now reports from nearly 100 countries. It proudly notes that AP was first to inform the world of stories such as Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and the Pearl Harbor attack.
The AP won last year’s Pulitzer Prize for public service, for courageous reporting from Mariupol “that bore witness to the slaughter of civilians in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
At the same time, publishers are trying to cope with rising expenses and revenues failing to keep pace.
Many are deciding their best hope is to just focus on their local-news franchise.
For some this may be the only choice. But I fear the trend limits the industry’s prospects, as fewer people are able to stay reasonably informed just by reading their local paper.
It forces customers to look elsewhere to assemble a decent news digest, which is the service they are paying to get from dailies.
“It’s not good for anybody to make a reduction of critical news sources, especially now, whether it’s AP or community based journalists,” said Heidi Wright, CEO of Oregon publisher EO Media and president of the America’s Newspapers trade group.
But Wright said she appreciates Gannett’s decision because it’s “what we’re all doing.”
“We cut AP out of some of our smaller papers in favor of keeping local journalists employed,” she said. “I understand what they’re doing. It’s just very difficult.”
AP, Gannett and McClatchy declined to make spokespeople available.
A Gannett statement said the decision “enables us to invest further in our newsrooms and leverage our incredible USA Today Network of more than 200 newsrooms across the nation as well USA Today to reach and engage more readers, viewers and listeners.”
Lauren Easton, AP’s vice president of communications, said via email it was “shocked and disappointed” by Gannett’s memo.
“We remain hopeful Gannett will continue to support the AP beyond the end of their membership term at the end of 2024, as they have done for over a century,” Easton wrote.
Newspapers cutting AP services may have been influenced by some of its recent decisions.
The AP is building a direct-to-consumer business online, which takes readership from newspaper members’ websites.
It has also licensed stories to free commercial websites, as newspapers added paywalls because their survival now depends on subscription sales.
In July AP licensed its archive to ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
Many newspapers are blocking the artificial-intelligence company from accessing their websites, until they can get fairly paid for the use of their work. The New York Times is suing OpenAI, alleging copyright violations.
By providing a critical mass of news to improve OpenAI’s system for answering online queries, wire services reduce leverage publishers have to get paid by the company.
Then on Feb. 14, AP announced it would provide elections data, its crown jewels, for free to more than 400 nonprofit outlets, through a Google partnership.
“Basically they’re going into direct competition with for-profit members that are paying the fees,” Wright said.
She suggested AP “open up conversation about how can we support you publishers, especially in smaller markets, because that’s not been figured out yet.”
One such market is Spokane, where dropping AP a few years ago was a difficult decision for Stacey Cowles, publisher of The Spokesman-Review.
Cowles, his father and grandfather served on AP’s board. His great-grandfather helped reorganize it at the turn of the previous century.
“There was huge value in those days in the international report, particularly, that AP put out,” he said. “But times have changed dramatically and now there are a lot of sources for that. The decision we came to was, we were not getting enough value from the money we were spending on AP and it made a lot more sense to put that money toward local reporting, because that’s the news you can’t get anyplace else.”
Whatever it takes, I guess, to keep publishing with as many journalists as possible.
That said, the big chains’ debt and cost-cutting record don’t give much hope that wire-service maneuvering will reanimate ghost newspapers, while the AP also loses resources.
“I think it does devalue the product,” Wright said, “even in the smallest of communities where we’ve had to make that tough decision.”
Brier Dudley on Twitter: @BrierDudley is editor of The Seattle Times Save the Free Press Initiative. Its weekly newsletter: https://st.news/FreePressNewsletter. Reach him at bdudley@seattletimes.com.
