An Editor & Publisher Columnist Has Suggested, “Fire the Wire” – Actually It Won’t Hurt To Reexamine A News Agency’s Role In Today’s Traditional Media World

Philip Stone March 5, 2007

How many journalists out there remember when there were two really great American news agencies – The AP co-operative and the supposedly for profit UPI run by an E.W. Scripps trust. The rivalry between the two was legendary and their journalism the best. But American newspapers decided in the 1980s they didn’t want to pay for two news agencies so they let UPI die. Shame on them!
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Yes, there is still a UPI today, but it is not even a shell of its former self, having moved from bankruptcy to bankruptcy to new owner to new owner. But UPI’s demise does rather beg the question of the real value of a news agency in today’s Internet-driven world. Do traditional media really need news agencies as they once did, and if they do, are they worth today’s price?

The E&P columnist’s point was that newspapers should be concentrating on local, local, local, so take the money paid to a news agency and instead invest that in more local resources – journalists, photographers and the like.

The answer to that really lies in how much the newspaper is paying for its news agency. In the US when there was that AP-UPI competition, rates were kept extremely low – an agency could usually be bought for the cost of one or two local journalists. With the UPI competition gone and AP rates much higher over the past 20 years  -- probably higher than if there had been the UPI competition -- it won’t hurt a newspaper to study the best use of available funds. For what you get there is no doubt a news agency is great value for money, the question becomes, do you need what you get?

And the question now goes one step further – do you need the agency for the news it provides? Let’s face it news from AP and Reuters, for instance, is available for free all over the Internet and it gets put up on those web services very quickly. If the information is there for free then why pay for it?

Well,  the lawyers get involved there and start talking about copyright and the like and what you read on the Internet is for informational purposes and not for republication. Remember the only thing that is really copyright is the actual way the story is written, not the information within the story. Pick up the story and run it whole and the lawyers will nail you; rewrite it and who is to say where the information came from?

This writer remembers a time in London when the Daily Telegraph as a cost savings dropped Reuters and bought the far less expensive AFP service. But Reuters would have the nasty habit of having frequent exclusives AFP didn’t, yet there on the front page of The Telegraph was that information contained in the Reuters story, exclusive quotes and all, but absolutely no Reuters credit. They just picked up the story from the Internet and rewrote it.

Of course it takes bodies to do that rewrite, but then it is a question of how much you pay for a wire service and how much those rewrites cost.. The Telegraph managed quite well without Reuters and it took several years, at a greatly reduced rate, to entice it back.

What the media has never really challenged the news agency on is the true value of their stories in this Internet world. Those stories are out there for the world to read pretty darn fast on the Internet so why should a newspaper, television station, radio, even an Internet site pay a news agency for that same copy that is right there for free on the agency’s own web site, or on web sites which are licensed for that material. By the time a newspaper, for instance, uses that material it’s pretty stale.

For those financial clients where getting information a few seconds before the next person can mean making a small fortune on a trade getting the information directly from the agency is essential, but for the rest of us?

For a long time this writer, who worked for news agencies for 30 years, has struggled with a former client’s comment. The client  had canceled the Reuters service and bought another agency and after a few months there was a meeting to see if the client had now seen the error of his ways.  His response has remained to this day,” Phil, there is no question that your service is better, much better than what we now have. But I have to tell you that for our needs the service we now have is good enough.”

The “good enough” principle raises so many possibilities. How about this scenario  -- hire a warehouse in Bangalore or wherever journalist costs are low (with Indian inflation and journalist wages jumping we may have to go more third world) and fill it with journalists with excellent foreign language skills  and PCs with a huge Internet pipeline. Divide the journalists into world sections – Europe, North America, Africa, Asia-Pacific etc.,  and have them act like spiders trawling through trusted media sites in their sections. Grab the stories of most interest, rewrite for an international audience  and voilà – you have the new PMS news service.

Because it has no foreign correspondents, no bureaus, no sales people – selling is done automatically on the Internet, no big accounts department --billing is via Paypal or some such on the Internet,  and the service is Internet delivered. its cost basis is thus very cheap, and that means its rates would be very cheap.  It obviously wouldn’t be as fast or as good  as a Reuters,  AP, and the like, its news is dependent on the accuracy of the source rather than its own correspondents, its breaking news would be behind, and there are no doubt are other criticisms of such a news report, but for all of that for the vast majority of news media out there that type of news agency would be “good enough”.

Once you buy into that philosophy the possibilities are endless. You can get really parochial. Small town newspapers and other media in the US state of Indiana, for instance,  that no longer want to pay the AP the kind of money they are for an Indiana state service could subscribe to the PMS Indiana service. It’s the same principle and what does it matter if the “wire” is filed inside Indiana or thousands of miles away. What it has to do is provide a product that is “good enough”. There are no long distance telephone charges if you want to talk to the Indiana desk – just talk to it via Skype or equivalent.

So when the  E&P columnist suggests firing the wire service, that might be a bit extreme, yet examining the cost of that existing service and deciding if in today’s world that is true value for money or if there is a better way of spending that money is a worthy exercise.

Should we try and start up the PMS news service? Your thoughts to ftm Conversations

ftm Follow Up & Comments

"It's certainly cheaper to look-up international news on the web, rewrite the story and voilá!" - March 5, 2007

Dear Phil,
 
Read with much interest your today's column about the necessity to subscribe to an agency news service.
 
I agree with you, the world has changed with the internet. Local news are the driving force for readers to buy a newspaper, international news find little space in a daily. It's certainly cheaper to look-up international news on the web, rewrite the story and voilá!
 
In talks with editors of small-town newspapers and other media have noticed that many of them are deeply satisfied with the news content of our dear Graphic News service. I find more stories without a graphic than with a graphic when I read the papers. Reason for our doing well is that Graphic News is a comparatively cheap service, it offers the option to use the graphic or concentrate on rewriting the underlying news story. Duncan is great in selecting top news for his graphics.
 
If you start your PMS news service, let me know, please.
 
Bests, Traute
 
Traute Redlich