Friday, October 17, 2008

Under pressure: Tribune vs. AP

The Tribune company gave notice to the Associated Press that it would drop the APs service in 2010.

Interesting that the AP could get a contract that required two year's notice in the first place, but the Tribune company may be firing the shot in an attempt to hedge their bets against a possible sale...or just to have negotiating leverage. 

Full story available at Editor and Publisher, here

So what?

Newspaper readership continue to slide nearly as quickly as the stock market (see prior post on reaership here)...with so much of the AP's content available online via news aggregators--and essentially free--one might see an analogy to manufacturing:

"a manufacturer (AP) sells through distribution (the papers)" 

The trouble, if you will, comes from AP going direct to consumers (via aggregators)...while trying to maintain pricing power as if the distributors had exclusivity!

As the newspapers struggle to find their voice in the community they serve, I'd expect more of them to question the ROI of AP-provided stories.


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