This just in...

Well, you may have noticed that the Mayans were wrong.  There was no apocalypse and we're all still here, careening toward 2013.  I am sorry I didn't blog for a while there but, in the absence of an apocalypse, I thought I had best do my Christmas shopping.

I hope you all had a wonderful break: a magical Christmas or a very restful Tuesday.  No matter how you spent yesterday, or even the day before that, you might have missed this little gem of a news story that I saw sneak through the wires on Christmas eve.  In fact, it's a news article about the news.  And how you may, or may not, be getting that news from your local newspaper.

The Chicago Tribune, and 6 other sister papers, have all decided to drop the services of the Associate Press in favor of Reuters America.  One of the 6 sister papers impacted is my own local Hartford Courant.  This has me befuddled.  I grew up understanding that the little "AP" stamp on a story was a kind of seal of approval.  This meant that the article that was before me had been tested somehow.  What happens now?

The AP has been around since 1846 and is an American news agency.  You can read more about it here.  It is cooperatively owned, and the contributing newspapers, tv and radio stations write stories and use content that is created by the staff journalist.  In exchange for either membership or a pay-fee service, all of the news items generated can be published and re-published.  This, for years, was how local papers got along without a foreign correspondent, or a dedicated sports desk.  Using AP services meant that you had the resources of many newspapers at your disposal.  It was a kind of co-op, for news and now The Tribune has decided to opt-out.

I don't mean to sound like I am naive; I understand that this is largely a financial decision.  This move, according to Feder in the article above, will likely save the Tribune about $5 million dollars a year.   Still, would this be worth the savings in the end?  The 37-year veteran of print newspapers and former editor of North Carolina's News & Record, John L. Robinson says that there's a right reason and a wrong reason to make a change like this.  He says that if it's just the money, it's the wrong reason.  Papers need services like the AP to fill the pages.  Plain and simple.  It is very likely impossible or further cost prohibitive to hire the local reporters needed to mind the gap.  There will still have to be some outsourcing.

The Tribune and, locally, the Courant will be looking to Reuters to "fill the pages."  Reuters is a much newer name in the game than the Associated Press.  Reuters is an international company, which really didn't make it to the scene until about 2008.  In fact, some of the birth of the Reuters brand came at the hands (and careful contract construction) of the people over at the Tribune parent company.  Back in 2010, Newsonomics posted an article about Reuters move into the American market.  Here's a snippet of what that deal looked like.

What is Reuters America, and what is it offering Tribune, and now others, as it aims to benefit from newspapers’ occasional family squabbles with AP? The new product is plainly aimed to be a replacement for AP.  The new news service combines lots of elements to try to do that:

• Reuters says it is committing to staffing 103 U.S. cities, though at unspecified levels. The staffing will be a mix of full-timers and stringers. The offices will share daily budgets with Tribune (and future customers), and offers to do on-demand stories, maybe as many as two to three a day, as requested by clients.
• A beefed-up sports offering, intended to shore up a long-time Reuters deficiency in the U.S. market. Cricket and rugby coverage just doesn’t cut it here, so Reuters has partnered with Sports Direct, the Sports Xchange and SB Nation to pump up coverage.
• It’s adding The Wrap News for more entertainment content.
• It’s partnering with Pro-Am Examiner.com, harvesting the work of those contributors.

Notice the last three bullets.  Reuters is pulling from Sports Direct, The Wrap News and Pro-Am Examiner.  Peter Drucker's "Do what you do best, and outsource the rest" is alive at Reuters, according to Newsomomics.  It's outsourced news that's been outsourced, all of it getting further and further away from the little local paper.

I understand also that all of this outsourcing for the news isn't new, and it is likely another symptom of a chronic illness from which print media seems to be suffering.  Sarah Lacy, over at Pandodaily, suggests that this is just another milestone in the slow death of print media.  She goes on to say that being "the paper," the publication of record for an area and the news source, has always been a key requirement for papers like the Courant to thrive.  

Are local papers just giving up on that? In an Internet-connected world, maybe they should. As I noted above, the idea that people know nothing that happened in the previous 24 hours until a plastic-wrapped dead tree lands on their porch is silly. On the other hand, if that’s not the role of a local paper, what is the role of a local paper? Are they tacitly admitting to advertisers and readers that there isn’t one?

Ouch.

Maybe there's no such thing as local news anymore.

Well, that's enough Doomsday for one day.  I'm starting to miss the Mayans.