John Webster is Editorial Operations Director for The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash.
CAN NEWSPAPERS FULFILL THEIR CHANGING mission without membership in The Associated Press? The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Wash., has determined it is possible, and at a significantly lower cost.
Our newspaper recently notified AP that it would terminate its membership in August 2010. In the meantime, The Spokesman-Review will continue studying its options and negotiating with a number of providers, including the AP.
Last August, Editor Gary Graham and I began assembling an alternate package of syndicated content to meet our needs.
Regional news, from the Pacific Northwest, is among our priorities. This fall, the Northwest's newspaper editors began discussing the possibilities of a reciprocal story exchange. Informally, newspapers have done this for years - for example, trading our coverage of a collegiate basketball game in Spokane for another paper's coverage of a collegiate game in Seattle.
If you expand this concept beyond sports and plug it into the Internet's low-cost, immediate delivery protocols, the potential is significant. Nothing's final, but we feel optimistic that this concept can work to our mutual advantage.
Although our newspaper's mission will focus on local news, we continue to need some national and international news. These are the providers we evaluated, for content from beyond our region: PA
SportsTicker (for sports agate and news), Newscom (for photos), New York Times, McClatchy-Tribune, Los Angeles Times/Washington Post, Reuters, Bloomberg and Custom Flow Solutions (provider of stocks pagination software).
We already subscribe to some of these services. In the course of our investigation, we discovered that the additional costs we would incur totaled one-fourth of what we have been spending on AP. And, for our needs, the content from these new providers would be superior to what we have been buying from AP.
As we began our search, we felt the greatest challenge would involve sports agate. We discovered, however, that PA SportsTicker offers statistics more comprehensive than AP's and can deliver its feed either in plain text or XML format.
A related challenge is the need to reprogram wire-handling systems to process feeds in formats different from AP's. AP for years has delivered content primarily via satellite in ANPA format, a protocol dating from 1979.
AP's competitors offered us a good variety of Internet-based delivery methods, such as RSS and FTP. Some can deliver their feeds in ANPA format, as well as modern XML formats such as NewsML or NITF.
AP has said it plans to change the technical methods and protocols it uses for content delivery. So, technical changes will be necessary at all newspapers - whether they stay with AP or not. As long as newspapers plan ahead and prepare to retool on the technical side, we can be ready for the difficult road before us.
It is obvious that our industry faces financial challenge, including pressure for dramatic budget reductions. And yet, we must strive to capitalize, in print and online, on our core asset - locally gathered news. In this tough environment, we have a fiduciary responsibility to our audiences and investors. Our responsibility is to explore every alternative to meeting their needs. *