Markets

Is AP to Blame for Killing Newspapers?

By David Weir

Updated on: April 3, 2009 / 10:45 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

There's a new party getting blamed for the death of newspapers -- the good-old Association Press. The line of reasoning goes like this: By allowing Yahoo, MSN, Google and others access to its news wire, the non-profit news cooperative is undermining the very companies that own it.

Writing in the American Journalism Review, journalist Paul Farhi advances this case by making a number of provocative points:

The AP has effectively enabled hundreds of news sites to spring up and compete with its member papers.
In the process, the AP has effectively prevented newspaper sites from charging for content. "Why buy a copy of The New York Times, or bother going to its Web site, when the AP's versions of the same national and international events are available just about everywhere?"
The AP also is competing directly with major newspapers like the Times by employing some 3,000 journalists in 243 bureaus around the globe.

Farhi considers whether an alternative strategy, such as restricting AP's content to its members' sites, might have helped avert the disaster now engulfing newspapers. But that would have only allowed AP's competitors Reuters, Agence France-Presse or one of the smaller news wires, to step into the lucrative business niche of selling content to the big online portals.

These days the AP is facing a rebellion from its members, as we've noted recently. Ultimately, the newspapers that own the cooperative will have to decide whether to compete or collaborate with the online giants that increasingly are setting the standards for news online.

There's a lot more in Farhi's fascinating piece, which you can access here.