| We've written before about how much of the MSM has closed out many of their local bureaus. For a lot of base news, they depend either on one another, as through pool reports, or through AP, Reuters or another bureau. Next week, the Tribune Company newspapers will cease using AP materials, with the exception of sports statistics and any information not available from any other source. This experiment will last one week, as the Tribune Co. evaluates cost cutting methods. The Tribune gave AP a required two year warning last year that it might drop the AP service beginning in October of 2010. This situation will affect Tribune dead tree editions, but not web content nor its television stations. Besides the content provided by the staff of its own titles, Tribune Co. newspapers will draw from such news sources as Reuters, the Washington Post, New York Times, Agence France Presse, Cable News Network, Global Post, Bloomberg and McClatchy newspapers during its AP-less trial. Not all of those sources are normally available to Tribune Co. papers.
I wonder how much AP content the Trib will pull from WaPo and the Times. Also how it will affect the disparity of content between its dead tree editions and web sites. I've been trying my own little media experiment. If you're a long term reader, you are used to seeing pieces drawn from information I've plucked from the dead tree edition of the USA Today. You may have noticed that you haven't seen one for a while. For the past month, I've gone dead-tree-free. USA Today offers two types of on-line content. One is a web site which is poorly organized, lacking in much of the content in the paper edition, and replete with a close to useless search function. The other is an actual web copy of the paper itself. I'm pretty convinced if one has a 42" plasma tv onto which one can project the web version, it would be readable. Otherwise, it's incredibly hard to deal with: either the text is too small to read, or you can only see a little piece of the page. The format does not lend itself to web viewing, although the content is terrific. There is no doubt that I, as a blogger, lack an important data source by not reading the paper every day. USA Today has done some terrific investigative journalism, unique topics and information. Because I pay for that data, attribute it, and adhere to the fair use doctrine, what you read here is likewise enhanced when I use their information for both presentation and additional analysis. There is also no doubt that media is changing. The MSM is not the monolithic voice of authority that it was a generation ago. But from the pool that follows the president, to the play-by-play sports stats, to the data digging necessary to find out that yes, Virginia, there is BPA in your canned green beans, SOMEONE has to do the raw data collection. Will the Trib newspapers suffer from the lack of the AP? Will the bloggers who do analysis suffer if they lack access to such data? Will it cause the data SOURCES to become even more limited? I don't know. But like the Trib (albeit on a much smaller scale) I'm trying to weigh the sources that are free against the paid sources to make sure there is maximum benefit for the most reasonable cost. |
