AP: How Things Have Changed

Jay -- Thanks for this article. It made me sad. I'm just a reader/researcher, but the distinction between the AP issued breaking news, basic facts vs. commentary and interpretation has always been clear to me. I do see "basic facts without commentary" as a public good, and wish it could continue that way. Also, the bits about pricing made me wonder how small-town newspapers would be impacted. My local newspaper already struggles to not become completely insular... the AP national and international news is all they've got. If that were to disappear because of increased costs that the local newspaper couldn't afford, I don't know how the newspaper would adapt to cover events and stories beyond the immediate area. Just thinking out loud...
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Good story.

sg thanks for pointing out the Frum piece. Two things amused me.
1) that he refers to republicans and conservatives. Seems everyone has given up pretending that republicans ARE conservative
B) That his doomsday scenario about the Democrats having one party rule is exactly what the country got with republicans in charge. Sweet, sweet projection.

For those interested. Real Clear is back but only has posts from 2006.

Frum is delusional for not recogonizing that the GOP needs a time out so they can put the fringe back in the closet. And no amount of misdirection (beware of the scary Democrats) is gong to change that.

dee I think it is pretty much a lock that the fringe is all that will be left of the GOP. They will be not in the closet but in charge.
If I'm right then 2010 will make 2008 look like 2002.

The kicker:

"The eight largest papers in Ohio have formed their own co-op and exchange stories with one another for free."

Good. This trend will continue and flatten the information supply chain in a way that does not penalize the reader one bit. The AP was the vestigial tail of a Town Crier system of information dispersal. Good riddance.

The Fornier issue wasn't just a matter of him being asked to take a job and rejecting it. It was conversations that lasted several months before he decided to take the AP job instead.

It just isn't democrats he has attacked. He has attacked every opponent of John McCain. He went hard after Romney when Romney was the competitor. Then he switched to Hillary and Obama when they were McCain's rivals.

Fornier holding this position is simply unacceptable in this campaign. We joke about Michael Scherer being in the tank, but Fornier literally is in McCain's pocket.

2 Things:

1: Some have begun to explore opting out, and at least 16 have done so, including the Tribune Co. with its nine papers....

Having 9 papers and a high quality operation puts them is a position to be Able to opt out. Not everyone's that fortunate.

2: Great article....

Good piece, Jay. Someone has to be the Joe Friday of the news world: "Just the facts, ma'am."

I've always regarded AP at the national level as near gospel, but the Fournier performance has left me unable to take anything from AP at face value.

Ap coverage of yesterday's appearances included this: "While [Palin] spoke, the crowd at her rally cried out about Obama: 'He's a socialist.'"

The New Yorker used to have an occasional feature that, applied to this "quote," would read thus: "Cries We Doubt a Crowd Ever Cried."

Here are some dumb parts to the article (not that I'm slagging you, JNS, on the contrary I am glad you brought these shifts to our attention):
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People, he predicted, will get their news online in nuggets that they pick and choose, ignoring the rest. You like Barack Obama? Here's an RSS feed of everything being written about him -- and nothing about John McCain to give it context. Like Picasso? Here's everything we have on him, but you may miss the Renoir exhibit because you failed to sign up for Renoir alerts. For the AP, this future is potentially profitable because, with its new online partnerships, it can deliver tailored news directly to every reader's, viewer's and listener's inbox.
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A pure mainline of Obama news doesn't cut it. Any reader of news (hopefully) starts piecing together the fact that so very many things are interrelated.
The trick is to separate out the dross (ie anything written by Bill Kristol); I don't need Fornier doing that for me.
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But in a world, and a Web, full of analysis, opinion and "accountability journalism," what's missing is a neutral referee.
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I would like to agree with that, but given how Scherer and Carney treat the notion of a neutral reference, I am willing to suffer with Greenwald's biased posts for a while yet.

Ha! I knew that comment would draw down some moderation!

They'd best get this nonsense fixed, else folks will be moseying on.

Also:
sgwhiteinfla, the Frum article is pretty great. There's a huge typo, though:
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I could pile up the poll numbers here, but frankly . . . it's too depressing. You have to go back to the Watergate era to see numbers quite so horrible for the GOP.
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I think he meant to say, "I could pile up the poll numbers here but they are unbelievable awesome. It's like all of our sins over the past half century are coming back to bite us in our fat, cottage cheesy rear ends!"

Hey, fantastic! That didn't get moderated! I'm like 4 for 10 now!

Also:
Second, the political culture of the Democratic Party has changed over the past decade. There's a fierce new anger among many liberal Democrats, a more militant style and an angry intolerance of dissent and criticism. This is the culture of the left-wing blogosphere and MSNBC's evening line-up -- and soon, it will be the culture of important political institutions in Washington.
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I find it interesting that Frum (along with every other right-winger I've seen) does not acknowledge the reasons behind our anger. To them, it's just us getting angry for no reason at all.

Good link, sgwhiteinfla, good link.

Bias comes in many thousands of shades other than "Fournier Red." This is why removing the toll gate that is the AP is, in the long run, a good thing for the communication side of journalism. As for the business side of journalism, it is a necessity that the industry get pancake-flat ASAP or risk death.

Good article, JNS. I don't know if I should be sad for the loss of AP qua AP, but it seems sad somehow.

The basic point that Fournier appears to be missing is newspapers want news - the analysis they can do for themselves under more forgiving deadlines.
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There's also the fundamental falsehood underlying Fournier's assumption that 'analysis' doesn't have a bias. In the very act of moving from neutral-but-hopefully-well-informed observer, the journalist has to come down on one side or the other. Not that it's impossible to do analysis without bias, but it requires particularly adroit journalists working with the luxury of a few days remove.
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There's also the suspicion that if you ask your reporters in the field to take a position, they are liable to think what position their bosses would like them to take. No point writing copy that will never run. And it's not exactly a state secret as to where Fournier's allegiances lie.
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At the end of it all, the AP ends up doing precisely what they were formed not to do - present news with a slant.