The Minneapolis Star Tribune is going to drop The Associated Press!! That’s like a bunch of coal miners in 1938 saying they’re leaving the UMWA. Is this the first chink in the armor, hole in the dike? I hope so.
No organization has deteriorated more in the past 25 years than the AP. From the respected dealer in wholesale, objective, no-local-influence news, AP has become an unscrupulous, sycophantic, left-wing propaganda outfit rivaling Izvestia in its heyday.
About 12 or 15 years ago, when I was still at The Herald-Sun in Durham, N.C., we seriously considered dumping AP, which cost us more than $150,000 per year, and trying to start a competing wire service of local papers in North Carolina. Our plan fell through, but lately some smaller papers have gone that route. Our problem in the early- to mid-’90s was that AP was a captive of The News & Observer and its then-publisher Frank Daniels Jr., who was on the AP’s national board.
Strangely, every story we broke and sent to AP carried no attribution for The Herald-Sun. But every story, even minor ones, that The N&O broke were attributed to them. Maddeningly, even when we broke a story and the AP ignored it for two days, the AP would attribute it to The N&O when they’d run a rewritten version 24 or 48 hours after ours. Coincidence? I think not. It got to the point that my boss once told me that if our paper ever won the AP’s “Best Member” award he’d fire me on the spot.
Perhaps the AP’s come-uppance is finally beginning to come around. The noted student of news Steve Burriss has wondered for some time why newspapers put up with AP’s nonsense. Maybe they’re beginning to realize they don’t have to.
UPDATE: Related schadenfreude. New York Times going down the dumper.
