Love On The Rocks

The Associated Press may not be all that in the news reporting business.

The Chicago Tribune is going to test that theory.

A newspaper can't afford to put reporters all over the globe to catch the latest news. They've come to rely on other sources, like the Associated Press, to provide content for a fee. The stories are ready to go, can be edited down to fit the column space available, and the paper is as current as the print medium can be.

The fee is the part of the equation that's not adding up for the Tribune Company. Struggling to emerge from bankruptcy brought on by a heavily leveraged buy-out, the newspaper is looking to cut costs and they've discovered that AP isn't cheap.

Starting next week, the Chicago Tribune will use AP on a limited basis. If a story can be obtained from Reuters, CNN, or the New York Times among others, they'll buy that content and AP can go scratch.

Anyone with a subscription to the Tribune knows that there's precious little news and much less physical paper than there used to be. To cut costs, the volume was brought down, and there's not so much need for AP stories to fill out the pages. There simply aren't that many pages.

Some might say that newspapers are dinosaurs in a digital age, dying out. That puts the Associated Press in a bad position, not a dinosaur itself but symbiotically dependent on the industry.

Newspaper watchdogs will follow the experiment and study the feedback from Tribune readers....at least those who are left.

AP has a web presence. Subscribers to the Chicago Tribune who miss their stories in the morning paper can simply log on and fill in the gap, for free.