Wrong on the Associated Press, Matt Pearce

Pearce is generally a very good guy on journalism stuff. I've followed him on Shitter for years.

But this piece at his Substack, bemoaning Evil Craphouse (Gannett) shivving the AP is wrong.

First, let's do the obligatory perusing of Gannett's lie. Any money saved will not be used to improve Gannett journalism; it will instead pay off vulture capitalists and/or line CEO pockets.

OK, that said, the deal itself?

Had a, say, pre-vulture capitalism McClatchey made such a deal with Reuters, or maybe a Lee Enterprises, or some other middling to large newspaper chain with half a sense of real journalism and not in the clutches of vulture capitalism? I'd applaud it.

To expand on what I told Matt in comments?

First, the AP has been just as much behind the curve on all things internet as any individual newspaper chain.

Remember that it was Deano Singleton as chairman of the board of AP who proposed the "TV model" for internet newspapers even though pay cable channels and pay-per-view CCTV etc existed well before the early 1990s. Remember that the rest of AP's board signed off on that.

Since then? AP has hosted internet spam by Taboola for years, and followed that up last year by officially deciding to enter e-commerce with ... Taboola! This ignores the ethics issue of trying to report on shit you're selling. (It was doing other content-shady things besides its Taboola partnership 15 years ago.)

It also "misstated, then adjusted" how much of its revenue still comes from US print.

And, I mistrust how much money-laundering may be behind its community journalism support.

Feel free to report on any or all of that, Matt. Rather than Wall Street having long knives out for the AP, the AP has been hopping more and more in bed with Wall Street for years.

And, while we're at it, speaking of Deano from the past? Hell, Matt, let's take a look at the Associated Press' current board of directors. The odious Will Lewis is on it. The dude who replaced Mary Junck (so hated and roasted by Bill McClellan at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch) at Lee Enterprises is there. (In fact, Junck was a former AP board chair.) Maia Abouelenein, before starting her own company, Digital and Savvy, was a bigwig at Google. Michael Newhouse, scion of the family that was one of the first larger chains to gut print newspapers, and in places like Cleveland, use webistes to do union-busting, is on it. In addition to the newspapers, Advance has a 30 percent chunk of Reddit, a slice of cable giant Charter and more. And, in NOLA, it was a fuck-up. That's a bunch of capitalist verschnizzle on a company that you claim Wall Street hates.

As for papers leaving it? The AP was slow to react, in and after the Great Recession, to members' needs and not offering more tiers of membership services, like say, half a dozen.

As for bashing Reuters? Reuters started just like AP, as a membership news aggregation and collection service, but in the UK not the US. It's no more evil than AP getting in bed with Taboola, if even that evil. Maybe Agence France-Presse will do something similar.

As for the fact that AP is a cooperative? Could be good, could be bad. As for the fact it's a nonprofit? The NFL is a 501(c)6 nonprofit. Catholic hospitals denying all women's reproductive services are nonprofits. The NRA is a nonprofit. Means nothing.