Orochi
Total Entries: 9
Total Comments: 637
11/02/09 22:35
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AP wire is a service that for X amount of money per week/month will let you pull content from given you meet contractual obligations.
In the lore of newspapers past... before wire service... if a newspaper wanted stories from other cities, they would have to employ someone full time in that city. Generally, all of your personal overhead was taken care of and you were given a small personal stipend. So, while you didn't make much money on paper, your pay plus benefits in today's terms would be a six-figure salary.
Basically, the AP is a collection of newsources who agree to pay into a pool and whenever something happens somewhere... an AP press agent and the newspaper will get a hefty payment. And anyone who pays into the AP will be able to use all of the content on the AP as they see fit.
For a long time and until very recently (in the last two to three years), the internet actually bolstered the financial backbone of a newspaper. What killed it was the combination of internet video and broadcast news.
Both of these have very good reasons why they beat out newspapers... their infrastructure cost is competitively low. If you have a frequency or a cable channel or youtube, you can pump out a near infinite amount of content without worrying about quality or context.
Basically, a regular "local" paper is about 60% local content and 40% wire content. What people tend to fail to understand is what makes up local content-- that is the police reports, classified ads, legal postings, weather, "community calendars," and other nonsense that in the media world is referred to as "filler content."
When I use to do this for a living, we actually did a survey once and found that the most important parts of the newspaper were to people were international news, comics, games and job ads.
Most people didn't actually care about local news and those interested in local politics expressed that most of them find out local issues from various governmental websites.
In fact, most of the local politics and agenda meetings would often be e-mailed to us at 4 a.m. to avoid running in the paper and letting the general public know about it. Now, I'm not trying to paint an unfair picture but the majority of our ability to inform the public about things like zoning changes was because of people who occupy a certain political spectrum (i.e. the far right and liberterians).
Sometimes, we would get informed that a special "public" meeting was taking place minutes before it happened. LIKE THAT DOES ANYONE ANY GOOD.
It's a ballsy move but the tribune has their own long line of news wires including tribune media and knight-ridder. I think Tribune across all of its papers will have enough to fill a standard newspaper but basically all that news will be individual perspectives on what is essentially published in the US Today.
It will definitely cut their overhead costs but it won't make their newspapers profitable.
The cost breakdown to the newspaper world is printing -> delivery -> news staff.
I know people will get up in arms over this but there is a substantial correlation between suburbanism and newspaper health. The longer the routes and the farther the houses are placed, the more expensive the newspaper is.
That and newspaper printing facilities are typically considered "heavy industrial" meaning that they are slowly disappearing. This despite the fact that that newspapers are a relatively clean industry (there is far more toxins in a wal-mart than in a press), newspapers are often printed up to 300 miles away from the destination distribution!
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