I (Yes I) Might Have Been Wrong!

Yep. Its true! My crystal ball recorded that as the pulp press started to die that the rising stars that would be left would be the wire services — AP, Reuters. It just made sense. Those feeds would be the basis for the wired news of the future, aka DrudgeReport, et. al. This comes out of left field –

New Jersey’s Star-Ledger today put out an entire edition without anything from the Associated Press within. The sharp-eyed reader will notice lots of local news by staff plus articles from other papers–Washington Post, LA Times, McClatchy, the Glouceseter County Times–and content from online services such as Sportsticker.

It’s one more nail in the heart of the AP as other papers cancel their contracts and more threaten to.

At the same time, Political announces that it will give stories to papers with ads attached that Politico and Addify sell and they will share revenue with the papers. Politico’s deal is the first major substantiation of the reverse-syndication model, a product of the link economy. It’s another nail in the heart of the Associated Press, which is built instead for the content economy.

The old syndication model in the old content economy just won’t work today when all the world needs is one copy of a story up in the cloud with links to it. Today, the more links that article can get, the more valuable it is. So sharing value with those who send links to it only makes sense.

The AP is not bad (no matter what foolish things it may have done in the blog kerfuffle recently). It’s just expensive. Papers the size of the Cleveland Plain Dealer say they pay $1 million a year. As they get more local, as reverse syndiction models come to the fore, as they have to tighten budgets, the industry-supported AP syndication model is mortally threatened. Still, this isn’t about the AP. It’s about the new architecture of news and media.

This changes the landscape some if it is successful. No it does not prevent the demise of pulp newspapers. That trend will continue. Especially with the regionals like LAT, AJC, NYT. But for the smaller local papers it stems a cash bleed. But more importantly it localizes the papers content which could well reinveterate readership. This would give those local papers the chance to make the transition to digital content.

Wild card. The self syndication is successful. Goes national. Rather than trading cash as a monetary unit the members of the syndicate trade news stories. A straight bater system. That would whack AP right the side of the wallet.

Long term I still don’t see how pulp survives. Too much is arrayed against it technically and economically. Nor do I see big regionals surviving. A big impersonal regional won’t be able to compete against a hometown flavored provider pulp or digital. I would be better served by reading Drudge for national coverage then going over the the local web site for the hometown stories.

But AP, Reuters dying I had not factored in.

Linky.