The Associated Press plans to cut its workforce by 8% through layoffs and buyouts, further thinning an organization that’s been a cornerstone of America’s news infrastructure.
The cuts follow decisions earlier this year by two of the largest newspaper chains, Gannett and McClatchy, to mostly stop using AP as they cut costs.
Many newspapers are narrowing their focus on just local news and paying less for wire services that provide regional, national and international news.
Local news is their franchise but this trend is giving subscribers less comprehensive reports of what’s happening. It’s also further reducing resources that the AP has to cover news in every state and on every continent.
No wonder Americans are becoming more isolationist. If they still have a local newspaper, chances are good it’s not doing much to inform them of what’s happening in the rest of the country and world and how they might be affected.
AP spokeperson Lauren Easton declined to comment on how the loss of newspaper clients contributed to the cutbacks.
Revenue from U.S. newspapers has fallen to about 10% of AP’s revenue, down from 100% when AP was formed in 1846 as a cooperative to serve newspapers, Press Gazette reported in June.
AP CEO Daisy Veerasingham announced the cuts in a Monday staff memo.
“We all know this is a time of transformation in the media sector. Our customers — both who they are and what they need from us — are changing rapidly,” Veerasingham wrote.
Veerasingham said accelerating the AP’s move toward a “digital-first news report” will “require making some difficult changes so we can invest more fully in our future.”
As an example of digital-first journalism, she noted recent election coverage with live video, visuals and “engaging interactives.”
The memo said less than half the cuts would affect news employees, and most affected employees are in the U.S.
An AP story reported that 121 News Guild members would be offered buyouts, and fewer than that many union members would be laid off.
News influencers: As newspapers and the AP shrink, a big portion of America is getting news from “news influencers” on social media.
Most of these personalities (77%) have no background in journalism or affiliation with a news organization. But one in five Americans now regularly turn to them for news, according to Pew Research Center.
Pew surveyed 10,658 Americans last summer as part of an examination of 500 popular news influencers, drawn from a review of more than 28,000 social media accounts.
The study defined “news influencer” as “individuals who regularly post about current events and civic issues on social media and have at least 100,000 followers on any of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter) or YouTube.”
Pew found that news influencers are mostly likely to be found on X but many also are on sites like Instagram and YouTube.
Among the 500 top news influencers, 63% are men.
Pew noted that many Republicans believe social media sites censor conservative viewpoints but actually, more of the popular influencers lean right. It found 27% identify as Republicans, conservative or pro-Trump and 21% identify as Democrats, liberal or pro-Harris.
Among the third of top influencers who are affiliated with news organizations, most (64%) “have no expressed political stance.” When they do have a clear stance, these news influencers are mostly conservative.
Younger Americans are more likely to turn to news influencers. Pew found 37% of adults under 30 “say they regularly get news from influencers on social media.”
Among ethnic groups, white Americans are the least likely to regularly get news from influencers on social media, as are upper income Americans. About the same share of Republicans and Democrats regularly get influenced by them.
Among social platforms, TikTok had the most even balance of right and left-leaning news influencers, Pew found.
All the other major platforms had more conservative news influencers, especially Facebook, where conservatives had triple the share as liberal news influencers.
Insert your own analysis of how this affected the election. To me it further builds the case for why America must revitalize its local news ecosystem.
Young people reading news: Young people may be reading more news stories than they realize, at least in the United Kingdom.
A study tracking online behavior of 993 15- to 29-year-olds over a month in 2023 found they read six news articles per day on average, and nine out of 10 read news at publishers’ apps or websites, Press Gazette reports.
That’s “far more often than they admit to in surveys,” it wrote, noting that just a quarter of 18- to 24-year-olds in another 2023 survey said they recently visited news sites or apps.
Billionaire ups Lee stake: Florida billionaire investor David Hoffman upped his stake in newspaper chain Lee Enterprises, bought 5% of the Dallas Morning News publisher and aims to build America’s second largest newspaper group behind Gannett, The Wall Street Journal reports.
“Hoffmann said he believes local newspapers ‘remain an integral part of the American fabric’ and are currently undervalued,” the Journal reports, “and that he thinks the industry can operate profitably in both print and digital.”
Reinvigorating a local newspaper: The family-owned Atlanta Journal-Constitution is investing $150 million in an ambitious plan to reinvigorate the newspaper. The paper is adding 100 new staffers this year, moved its newsroom back into the city from a suburb where it had relocated and is doubling down on print, offering free papers in Georgia cities where local papers declined, NPR reports.
“Instead of reading story after story about the futility of this,” Publisher Andrew Morse told NPR, “why don’t we grasp onto notions of, ‘How do we build for the future?'”
Brier Dudley on Twitter: @BrierDudley is editor of The Seattle Times Save the Free Press Initiative. Its weekly newsletter: https://st.news/FreePressNewsletter. Reach him at bdudley@seattletimes.com.
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