(Minneapolis Star-Tribune) tells AP: we're canceling

[Newsjock]

Source: MinnPost

It’s hard to imagine: the Star Tribune without the Associated Press.

But that’s what could happen in 2010; the region’s biggest news source recently sent the nation’s most prominent wire service the required two years' cancellation notice, an AP spokesman confirms.

... Strib managing editor Rene Sanchez insists the situation is less dramatic than it seems. “We have the utmost respect for AP; this is not a hostile gesture by any means," he says somewhat counterintuitively. "It’s the beginning of an assessment of our business model, not the end.”

... In Ohio, state media outlets have formed their own content-sharing service that bypasses AP and its fee structure.

Read more: http://www.minnpost.com/davidbrauer/2008/08/26/3130/strib_tells_ap_were_canceling

[movonne]

1. This sounds good...

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

2. There is more to this than apparent, at first blush.

The fee structure IS terrible, but then there is also the content they are receiving. It sucks these days.

[DCKit]

3. No doubt it would be cheaper to invest in a dedicated fax machine...

for all the WH "news" releases.

[Robb]

4. Localize, localize...

...It's the only thing a newspaper has the next one doesn't: local coverage. Done well.

It's the reason rural weeklies are still growing and everyone else isn't. Dig the moat at the county line and report only on that, and it'll get done well, and no one else will have that content.

[Demeter]

5. And People Get National Newz From Fox?

Talk about ignorant Americans!

The internet is the only reliable news source these days.

[glitch]

11. Put local content out on a grass roots wire and pretty soon we'll have a return to journalism

roots media in America, or back to what AP was before they were corrupted.

[harun]

18. Bingo (n/t)

[harun]

19. Hopefully a lot more organizations drop the AP, they have been corrupted (n/t)

[hay rick]

6. good riddance n/t

[CatholicEdHead]

7. Avista Capital Partners are cutting another string at the Strib

This is disgusting but just what Avista wants, to destroy the Startribune.

[Newsjock]

8. From last week: Idaho Falls drops the AP, too

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003839975

The Post Register of Idaho Falls, Idaho -- one of the newspapers that initially defended the Associated Press’ new controversial rate structure -- has given notice that it will drop the news service in two years in protest of the arrangement.

In a letter sent Friday to AP President Tom Curley, Post Register Publisher Roger Plothow informed the news cooperative of the decision, stating, “Given the AP’s historical inflexibility (particularly when it comes to small, independent newspapers), I fear the implications of what I’m about to write, but I can’t think of another option. I wish to give notice of our intent to cancel our AP contract effective August 15, 2010.”

... Plothow also called his $114,000 assessment for 2009 “the worst value for anything we purchase, since we use so little of what we’re paying for.”

[Festivito]

9. 'bout time. /nt

[truthisfreedom]

10. I wrote to them two days to complain about their idiotic right-wing DC bureau chief!

Check out my letter:


I'm sickened by the partisan writing by this new AP Bureau chief. Look at his recent article on Obama's choice of VP, the Honorable Joseph Biden. It's a hit piece on Obama! What kind of reporting includes language like "the ultimate insider" and "a campaign that has become more negative"??? The AP should be ashamed of itself for allowing this Rovian insider into it's fold. He's been connected to Bushco's Rove operation through an email from his office uncovered by congress that says "Keep up the fight!"

"Keep up the fight"??? Coming from a supposedly objective reporter? He also applied to the McCain campaign to work for them as recently as 2007... you can imagine how that conversation went. "You'll be able to help us a lot more on the inside, Ron... there's a nice fat check waiting for you if you help push John over the top."

Look, no matter what your personal politics, I'm appealing to you to try to take some action to reverse what's becoming an alarming trend... the "Fox"-ation of news, where everything is being tilted toward the far right, where corporate interests are being chosen above real news.

Please complain about this guy to AP! Tell them no more hit pieces on Democrats. We need unbiased journalism, not manipulation by our press. The AP is 160 years old... does it need to be wrecked from the inside by this kind of nonsense?

Thanks for taking the time to read my letter.

Regards,

[CatholicEdHead]

12. Please cross-post this in the Minnesota forum

[MetaTrope]

13. No more stories about runaway brides and bus accidents in Kerala?

What are their readers going to do?!

[lib2DaBone]

14. Who Needs AP.... A Neocon News Service!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/14/aps-ron-fournier-to-karl_n_112696.html

AP'S Washington Chief Ron Fournier E-Mail to Karl Rove.. "Keep up the good fight".


(Snip)
the House Oversight Committee has unearthed a key quote from the 50-page report on Pat Tillman - the former Arizona Cardinals star killed in the line of duty in Afghanistan under circumstances that the military labored to conceal from Tillman's family - and Jessica Lynch, who was caught up in some Iraq War mythmaking of her own.

On page 21 of the report, the committee reprints an email exchange between Ron Fournier - then a reporter for the Associated Press, now the head of the AP's Washington bureau - and Bush's chief adviser Karl Rove:

[Alcibiades]

15. This reminds me of the Railway Express Agency

and a lot of other great big honking companies that go the way of the dinosaur once a superior technology comes out.

They try a whole bunch of stuff, including moving prices, but ultimately none of it works. Lots of smaller papers get by just fine without the AP. I expect that many big-town dailies will discover that they don't need it, either, especially if it becomes TASS, which it appears to be doing.

[Justice]

16. Seems like lots of papers dropping AP - how can we track who and the total?

[Peace Patriot]

17. The Associated Pukes' 'reporting' on South America is bloody awful.

I first noticed how bad it was some years ago, before the corpo media lie that Hugo Chavez is a "dictator" had polluted our beautiful minds so pervasively. There was a preliminary to that lie, from the Associated Pukes, thus: "His critics say"--no quote, no attribution--"that he is increasingly authoritarian."

"His critics say...". Hm-m. I wondered who was actually saying this, and why AP couldn't just quote these "critics." So I did some research, and I could not find anyone, at that time, who had said it, except a very rightwing, old, Venezuelan Catholic Cardinal, who had spent his career in the Vatican finance office, and was fired during the fascist banking scandals in the 1980s. He said Chavez was "increasingly authoritarian."

I later learned that this Cardinal regularly railed against Chavez from his pulpit, and also that the context of his allegation ("increasingly authoritarian") was that Chavez had cut back on the government subsidies to the Church. Also, this guy was among a gaggle of rightwing Cardinals who supported the Bush-backed violent rightwing military coup against the Chavez government in 2002, which kidnapped Chavez and threatened his life, and suspended the Constitution, the courts, the National Assembly and all civil rights. Rounding up, torturing and 'disappearing' leftists would have been next, if the people of Venezuela hadn't poured out of their hovels, in the tens of thousands, surrounded Miraflores Palace, and demanded the restoration of their Constitution and return of their kidnapped president.*

There is no evidence--none!--that Chavez is a "dictator" or even tends that way. Every single allegation that "his critics" have made against him vanishes upon investigation--even just superficial investigation. Look into the facts, and you find that the OPPOSITE is true: Chavez has done more for democracy in South America than any leader in its history! And everyone there knows it. (Lula da Silva, the president of Brazil, recently, said, of Chavez: "You can criticize Chavez on a lot of things, but not on democracy." (!)). Elections in Venezuela put our own to shame, for their transparency. Venezuela has the liveliest, healthiest, most open political culture in the hemisphere and possibly in the world.

So AP is getting its info from corrupt, crazy old Cardinals, I remember thinking to myself. ("His critics say...".) This scurrilous writing tactic--unattributed allegations--seems more common now, has several forms ("Analysts say...," "Experts say...") and is often used by AP and by Reuters to dis Chavez and a whole host of new leftist leaders and Chavez allies covering the length and breadth of South America, including, most recently, the election of a leftist in Paraguay--Paraguay! (The Bush junta has "lost" South America, in case you hadn't heard.)

Degraded, low-minded, cheap, lying, obvious fascist psyops and disinformation: the Associated Pukes (and also Rotters...ahem, Reuters), straight from the Middle Ages Vatican finance office (the White House)**.

----------

*(See "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," the Irish filmmakers' excellent documentary on the 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela, available at YouTube and at www.axisoflogic.com.)

**(Did you ever notice how much Corporate Rule resembles the Medieval Church? It's scarily similar when you think about it, and it took over a thousand years to throw off that transnational propaganda machine, torturer and property-grabber.)

[lib2DaBone]

20. Well said. Thanks for the link.

I have suspected that to be the case RE: South America, although we may never know thanks to our Corporate Media. Even now, Bush has re-formulated the Caribbean task force from JAX Fla and is sending them to South America. Bush can't wait to bring "Democracy" to Chavez. And America slumbers on z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z.

[hasssan1]

21. GOOD , FUCK AP - THEY ARE GOP INSIDER AND TRYING HARD TO DAMAGE OBAMA

I HOPE THEY GO BANKRUPT