When I was a sprat learning my trade at the Colorado Springs Sun one of my jobs was to strip and sort the wire-service copy from the newspaper’s various teletypes, which supplied news and features from outfits like United Press International, The New York Times, and The Associated Press.
Mostly they’d just grumble along like everyone else in the newsroom, dutifully punching out bits of this and that. But occasionally they’d go wild, ringing bells like Quasimodo on meth, for big-ticket items like Tricky Dick’s resignation or the Symbionese Liberation Army going up in flames.
The teletypes and their bells are long gone, but the wire services remain. At some outfits, anyway.
But the “newspapers” of Gannett and McClatchy will soon be drastically reducing their use of The Associated Press, according to their corporate overlords via The New York Times.
The reasoning, such as it is, came laid out in the sort of grandiose and spurious bushwa favored by the mouthpieces who speak on behalf of that famous First Amendment advocate, Slander N. DeFame.
“Between USA Today and our incredible network of more than 200 newsrooms, we create more journalism every day than The A.P.” That’s Kristin Roberts, the chief “content” officer of Gannett, in a company memo. Anyone purporting to speak for journalism who frames it as “content” is farting higher than his or her arse.
That also goes for Lark-Marie Antón, a spokescreature for Gannett, who issued a statement proclaiming that ceasing to use AP articles, photos, and videos “enables us to invest further in our newsrooms.” Ho, ho, etc. I looked up “investment” in The AP Stylebook and it said nothing about gutting newsrooms, idling presses, and selling the buildings that once housed them both.
McClatchy, a once-proud news outfit based in Sacramento, was snatched up out of bankruptcy four years ago by the hedge fund Chatham Asset Management, ending 163 years of family control.
The new owners subsequently were charged with “improper trading of certain fixed income securities” and took a $19 million hit in fines and disgorgement, a story that apparently went uncovered in McClatchy publications.
But they don’t need the AP, either. Kathy Vetter, McClatchy’s senior vice president of news and audience, said in an email that the decision means her masters “will no longer pay millions for content that serves less than 1 percent of our readers.”
Like the ones who might like to know whose drawers the hedge fund is pulling down, hey? One doesn’t find piano playing of such quality in any old whorehouse. Bravissimo!
Thus our sources of information about the world outside the corporate boardroom — or inside it, for that matter — continue to dwindle. Back to you, Chet.
Mad Blog Media 
Hey, they’re winning hearts and minds, right? Speaking of such activity, when I was on my SE Asian tour, not with a guitar, we use to adjust the motor speed on our teletype and tune into the AP wire service on the shortwave receiver in the radio teletype van bunker that I hung out in. We got the AP news right off the air. Things are different now. Go to their web home page and you will see, top tight hand corner, a DONATE button. Brings this page up kinda sorta like NPR. I assume this is not good news.
https://apnews.com/donate
Ayuh, a tip jar is one thing for Live Update Guy and a whole other deal for a major newsgathering organization, amirite?
It’s interesting to note how quickly, in terms of the last 25 years or so, the information available to us has changed. Yes, we may now have more, but we (the end readers) are responsible to be able to do our own swimming through the odorous miasma. Unfortunately many of us are poor swimmers and prefer to loll in the Sargasso sea of our own interests. The loss of the AP news feed will only expedite the shift in the information communicated by the Gannett and McClatchy groups. But I suspect that those groups already knew that. Journalism is not something that would be found in their strategic mission handbook.
It sure is fortunate that we have our choir practice with old ink blokes like you huh?
and a Happy Spring to you! May your blossoms hang tough until more sedate weather has gained permanence around them.
Speaking of getting snatched up out of insolvency, a mysterious outfit has grabbed a shit-ton of pubs from the PNW and Hawaii, to be managed by some small-time outfit out of Alabama. Hat tip to the M-Dogg, a McClatchy vet.
Private investors, even from Canadia, heh, is a hard no.
Carpenter, I think, is window dressing while the vultures in the back strip the companies to the bone.
Welcome to the Wonderful World of Scale, kids!
I gave up on Gannet when they literally walked Brian Duffy to the at the Des Moines Register years ago.
And of course the McClatchy goons shitcanned three Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonists in one day. So fuck those guys, face down, in the mud.
Nah, they would probably enjoy it, and you would just get muddy.
Well if they paywall AP, I’ll pay up.
Fuck me running. Honolulu once had two pretty good newspapers, the morning Advertiser and the afternoon Star-Bulletin. They had long ago merged into one paper. Now the remainder gobbled up by vulture capitalism.
An old newspaper bro worked for the Advertiser Back in the Day®, IIRC. You live long enough you know someone who did something somewhere, I guess. Before much longer it will be One News Source to Rule them All. The Nazgûl News Network, with offices in Mordor, Sauron D. Necromancer, chairman and CEO. And now here’s Balrog with the weather! Don’t touch that Palantír!
Your blog post photo has me intrigued. Wasn’t Pope Benedict in his place long after B&W (sepiatone) was a common photography medium? The young man appears to be from the 1920’s or ’30’s. The newspaper appears to be “The Bulletin” from Bend, OR. I haven’t stumbled across a “Cantu” in Oregon politics but I’m guessing that the image is artfully recreated. If it is a recreation, the symbolism of the image isn’t very clear.
Shawn, I was looking for a newsboy pic to go with the post when I stumbled across that shot of an Oregon newsie circa 1930 at the blog of Jake Wildwood, a musician and self-taught repairman of stringed instruments from Rochester, Vermont. He liked the shot for its Richter-made uke; I liked it for the newsboy.
The articles on the newspaper cover in the photo are interesting. A little more research reveals my catholic illiteracy (perhaps something one can be proud of). Apparently there was a Pope Benedict XV from 1914 to 1922. The Bend paper was indeed, The Bulletin so that would coincide with the photo being from Oregon. I interpret one of the articles as Or”egon to Lead 3600 against Cantu”, and would think that it pertains to a battle during WWI. There is a Cantu, Italy but there are no records of a battle around there and although alliances were confusing, I don’t believe US troops fought Italy during WWI. So perhaps Cantu is a reference to Cantigy in France in 1918.
Alas, my interest in the photo regarded how easy it is to create images for a specific message. With the prevalence of AI generation and the recent customization of images by royalty of a certain island nation, it can be fascinating what 1000 words may be communicated.
As for your use of the image, I feel one element would have fit the tone of your message better: if the ukelele wouldn’t have had any strings.
Testing. Testing, 1, 2, 3. I’m seeing if I can comment from an old intelliVision controller. The graphics on the old crt are fascinating.