AP Offers Buyouts As Part of Pivot Away From Newspaper Journalism (apnews.com) 27
The Associated Press is offering buyouts to U.S. journalists "as part of an acceleration away from the focus on newspaper journalism that sustained the company since the mid-1800s," the not-for-profit outlet reported today. AP says it is making the move from a position of strength, responding to shrinking newspaper revenue and growing demand from digital, broadcast, and tech clients.
"The AP is not in trouble," said Julie Pace, executive editor and senior vice president of the AP. "We're making these changes from a position of strength but we're doing so now to recognize our changing customer base." From the report: The news organization is becoming more focused on visual journalism and developing new revenue sources, particularly through companies investing in artificial intelligence, to cope with the economic collapse of many legacy news outlets. Once the lion's share of AP's revenue, big newspaper companies now account for 10% of its income. "We're not a newspaper company and we haven't been for quite some time," [said Pace].
Despite changes -- the company has doubled the number of video journalists it employs in the United States since 2022 -- remnants of a staffing structure built largely to provide stories to newspapers and broadcasters in individual states have remained. That has its roots well back in American history; the AP was started in the mid-19th century by New York newspapers looking to share the costs of reporting outside their immediate territory.
The number of AP journalists who will lose jobs is murky, in part intentionally. The AP does not say how many journalists it employs, though it has a large international presence as well as its U.S. staff. Pace said the AP's goal is to reduce its global staff by less than 5%. The Marketing and Media Alliance estimated the AP had 3,700 staffers, but it was not clear when that estimate was made. Since buyouts are being offered now to only U.S. journalists, it stands to reason that the cut among that workforce will be more than 5%. Whether there are layoffs depends on how many people take the offer, Pace said.
"The AP is not in trouble," said Julie Pace, executive editor and senior vice president of the AP. "We're making these changes from a position of strength but we're doing so now to recognize our changing customer base." From the report: The news organization is becoming more focused on visual journalism and developing new revenue sources, particularly through companies investing in artificial intelligence, to cope with the economic collapse of many legacy news outlets. Once the lion's share of AP's revenue, big newspaper companies now account for 10% of its income. "We're not a newspaper company and we haven't been for quite some time," [said Pace].
Despite changes -- the company has doubled the number of video journalists it employs in the United States since 2022 -- remnants of a staffing structure built largely to provide stories to newspapers and broadcasters in individual states have remained. That has its roots well back in American history; the AP was started in the mid-19th century by New York newspapers looking to share the costs of reporting outside their immediate territory.
The number of AP journalists who will lose jobs is murky, in part intentionally. The AP does not say how many journalists it employs, though it has a large international presence as well as its U.S. staff. Pace said the AP's goal is to reduce its global staff by less than 5%. The Marketing and Media Alliance estimated the AP had 3,700 staffers, but it was not clear when that estimate was made. Since buyouts are being offered now to only U.S. journalists, it stands to reason that the cut among that workforce will be more than 5%. Whether there are layoffs depends on how many people take the offer, Pace said.
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Bullshit.
Re:Funny! "Pivot Away From Newspaper Journalism" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Funny! "Pivot Away From Newspaper Journalism" (Score:5, Informative)
Bullshit.
Got any evidence to prove the parent wrong? Because I suspect there's a LOT of black-and-white undeniable shit being slapped against your claim. Hard.
You have the burden of proof [yourlogicalfallacyis.com] backwards. Mr. AC made an assertion that the Associated Press "went full on Activist Group long ago". It's up to you, AC, to show evidence for that assertion, which takes more than another assertion that "there's a LOT of black-and-white undeniable shit."
OK, if there's "a lot" of undeniable shit-- show it. I'll help; here the AP website [ap.org].
Re:Funny! "Pivot Away From Newspaper Journalism" (Score:5, Insightful)
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AP spin (Score:2)
In other words, we are toast. Sad because AP was once one of the original newspapers/sites with journalists rather than editorialists but that ship has sailed for most if not all of those outfits. It's hard keeping up with the Kardashians/Jones, whatever.
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In other words, we are toast. Sad because AP was once one of the original newspapers/sites with journalists rather than editorialists but that ship has sailed for most if not all of those outfits. It's hard keeping up with the Kardashians/Jones, whatever.
Translation: A TikTok-edumucated audience, doesn't give a flying fuck about "AP" or truth anymore. Which is why AI is all the clickbait-rage.
Unfortunately that customer base is their target demographic now (by volume), in order to survive.
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So that's not actually the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
But no the problem isn't that young people don't care about truth. The problem is virtually all of the news outlets have been bought up by a handful of billionaires and those billionaires not only don't care about the truth they are actively opposed to it. So the last thing they're going to do is buy a bunch of AP stories and run them and pay the AP for real journalism. They want AI generated slop propaganda that tells you how great having an Epstein class is.
So for example they don't want journalists reporting on all the dead bodies in Iran from the civilian infrastructure we are targeting. And they don't want journalists explaining that when Trump said he would attack Bridges and power plants in order to get leverage during the negotiations that it became a war crime because you aren't allowed to attack civilian infrastructure just to get a leg up and negotiations, they have to be legitimate military targets.
Stuff like that is why the AP needs to go. Now billionaires don't do things out right and directly because you would notice and get pissed off. Instead they buy up all the newspapers and TV stations and then just stop buying content from journalist outlets. And then the predictable happens that the associate press can't make enough money to survive and here we are.
And most people don't put two and two together and realize that it was downstream impacts from the Epstein class season control of our media that killed journalism. Instead we blame tiktok which is to say young people because tick tock is associated with young people...
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We always like to blame the kids because we're old farts and old farts hate kids because kids backs don't hurt all the time and kids have their whole lives in front of them whereas we're staring down the barrel of eternity.. But no the problem isn't that young people don't care about truth. The problem is virtually all of the news outlets have been bought up by a handful of billionaires and those billionaires not only don't care about the truth they are actively opposed to it. So the last thing they're going to do is buy a bunch of AP stories and run them and pay the AP for real journalism. They want AI generated slop propaganda that tells you how great having an Epstein class is. So for example they don't want journalists reporting on all the dead bodies in Iran from the civilian infrastructure we are targeting. And they don't want journalists explaining that when Trump said he would attack Bridges and power plants in order to get leverage during the negotiations that it became a war crime because you aren't allowed to attack civilian infrastructure just to get a leg up and negotiations, they have to be legitimate military targets. Stuff like that is why the AP needs to go. Now billionaires don't do things out right and directly because you would notice and get pissed off. Instead they buy up all the newspapers and TV stations and then just stop buying content from journalist outlets. And then the predictable happens that the associate press can't make enough money to survive and here we are. And most people don't put two and two together and realize that it was downstream impacts from the Epstein class season control of our media that killed journalism. Instead we blame tiktok which is to say young people because tick tock is associated with young people...
As fun as it is to blame the rich for everything, and there is some truth to what you say, journalistic outlets were turning away from journalism long before the consolidation began. The consolidation was an end-result of journalistic outlets reaching for profit about truth-telling. It started with seeking profits, and eventually turned into chasing twitter trends and other online bullshit just to try to keep grabbing eyeballs. Once profit becomes your only motivation, all other matters cease to be a priori
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Times change. I remember a time when every newspaper had the AP and UP wire machines (teletypes) clattering away all the time, for that was the way to get national and international news. Those machines were, of course, eventually replaced by digital feeds. But as local newspapers close, the AP feeds and revenue are being reduced (and you can't just keep increasing prices to the fewer and fewer remaining newspapers). To survive at all, the AP needs to reduce costs, and one of their highest costs is the
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Times change. I remember a time when every newspaper had the AP and UP wire machines (teletypes) clattering away all the time, for that was the way to get national and international news. Those machines were, of course, eventually replaced by digital feeds. But as local newspapers close, the AP feeds and revenue are being reduced (and you can't just keep increasing prices to the fewer and fewer remaining newspapers). To survive at all, the AP needs to reduce costs, and one of their highest costs is the journalists. Reducing journalists will likely impact the value of their content. Whether AP survives long term is unclear, but this is probably a step they need to make now to try to survive.
I, too, remember a visit to the local newspaper, and saw the AP and UP wire machines . While I have long ago move away from those localities (and their newspapers,) I have watched as those local newspaper journalists have been replaced by corporate regional staff focused on corporate speak (i.e. if you want local news, look elsewhere). It is a race to the bottom for most local journalism, and I am not personality a fan, even though I understand the economics,.
Re:AP spin (Score:5, Informative)
In other words, we are toast. Sad because AP was once one of the original newspapers/sites with journalists rather than editorialists but that ship has sailed for most if not all of those outfits. It's hard keeping up with the Kardashians/Jones, whatever.
You're missing the point of the AP, and it's actual composition. I worked at a daily newspaper most of my way through undergrad and knew the ins and outs of the AP better than most.
The main use of the AP was to get international news to outlets who couldn't afford to place staff in places further away from their own location. A great example is any international war, though even big national events (9/11 being a great example) are also places where AP stories are valuable.
The AP carries very little editorial content. Yes there are a few editorial writers who publish there but the volume from them is minimal compared to the objective news reporting. Some people like to claim otherwise but that is from those who aren't actually looking at the body of work on ap.org.
Unfortunately the newspaper model is indeed dying. Many of us are lamenting it and we're not sure what solution could bring it back. Printed news was supported by advertising, both display ads and classified ads. In the 90s your local daily paper likely had 4-8 pages of classified ads, every day. Now the majority of that is on craigslist or facebook. On Sundays your paper had full color printed advertising inserts from over a dozen retailers; many of those retails have since gone out of business and many of the ones who remain don't advertise that way anymore. Online subscriptions can offset a small part of this, but only a small part. Online advertisements are blocked by most readers' browsers, so that isn't productive for newspapers in many cases either.
The tabloid and editorial "journalism" you refer to is successful because it does a better job of selling crap to its audience. Don't confuse it with the professionals at the AP.
What replaces their journalism? More yellow? (Score:4, Interesting)
I am curious what replaces top notch journalism these days. Will it "merely" be tinted/tainted views of events, or will it just be actual falsehoods and bald face lies, fresh from the LLM slop machine with ragebait, and almost zero useful, if not actionable info? Will we be seeing more creations of events in game engines to show a military victory?
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I am curious what replaces top notch journalism these days. Will it "merely" be tinted/tainted views of events, or will it just be actual falsehoods and bald face lies, fresh from the LLM slop machine with ragebait, and almost zero useful, if not actionable info? Will we be seeing more creations of events in game engines to show a military victory?
It entirely depends on the bloodlust of the audience clicking and generating the revenue to survive.
If we raise our kids properly they just might realize why they absolutely need to value Truth and Honesty in the future society they create. Because all of us grow tired of being fucked with by clickbait marketing. AI will only make that far worse, because gullible humans.
Imagine sitting down with someone born in this century and describing what it was like to be able to actually trust in life. At face va
Re:What replaces their journalism? More yellow? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a terrible place to be for those that want to deliver actual Journalism. And just as bad for those that welcome actual Journalism. The noise to signal ratio is just that bad.
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Top notch Journalism takes time to verify before printing. Today that doesn't work well when several Joe Blows have already put out a blog post on the same topic with no fact checking and even if completely wrong no one will bother to read the Journalist's equivalent in a few days after all the verification has been done.
It's a terrible place to be for those that want to deliver actual Journalism. And just as bad for those that welcome actual Journalism. The noise to signal ratio is just that bad.
On /. over the decades
"Why should I deal with ads, the internet is free"
"Why should I deal with paywalls, I can get the same AP article for free from a shittier website."
"Why should I deal with the news, I can get everything from Facebook"
"Why should I read anything ever it's all biased"
"Wants.. actual journalism" ... is some no true Scotsman bullshit, because you're either informed, read multiple sources and exercise critical thinking, or a moron.
To anyone that can't find "actual journalism", fuck you righ
eh (Score:1)
"Top notch journalism" doesn't exist much these days for a lot of reasons. Pretty much every media outlet just says what the government wants it to say. When there were more media companies and more money to go around, media companies could afford to take risks.
Substack is probably where you find the best journalism -- the very best journalists can command an audience each paying a few dollars a month and make millions. It's not as easy as just going to the newsstand now.
Propaganda for the Epstein class (Score:3, Insightful)
90% of our news media is billionaire owned propaganda. They spent the last 50 years buying everything up and what they couldn't buy up they sued into oblivion. Gwaker was a muckraking operation that did real journalism funded by that muckraking. That's why Peter thiel took them out. It wasn't because they outed him or anything, literally everyone on t
And I am getting pretty sick of explaining (Score:1)
The Epstein class here for each and every Slasdotter unable of any critical thinking
Because I did warn you several times but no nobody listens and nobody is able of any critical thniking
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
At least as long as Donald Trump is in the white house. I think we all know the American news media is captured by right wing, pro billionaire, pro Epstein class sources. It's just some of us seem to be okay with that because of reasons... It seems like about 40% of the country has just give
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I am curious what replaces top notch journalism these days.
This is a story about AP. They haven't been top notch in years, if ever. Their stories are purely surface-level. They're an important part of the picture, but certainly not top notch.
WTF? (Score:3)
I thought it was still April 1 but, no, I guess they really want democracy and journalism to die and are fine with accelerationist enshittification by abandoning their core mission, principles, and values with rudderless, unthinking expediency. So fucking dumb.