Until a few years ago they were essential. The big three survive in poor health, but they are all in the red: the Agence France Presse founded in 1835 is the oldest in the world, followed by the Associated Press (1846) and Reuters (1851). All three were born to cover empires that no longer exist, with offices around the world and with traditional clients who today no longer pay enough to maintain increasingly weaker newsrooms. The rest are mostly state agencies such as the German DPA, the Italian ANSA, the Spanish EFE, or the purely propaganda agencies of Russia and China.
Associated Press (AP) was the largest of all thanks to its cooperative formula. Its partners were the more than 2,000 North American newspapers that, in exchange for serving as local correspondents, were self-sufficient with the news flow generated by that network of local newspapers; They paid little because AP sold its services all over the world and no one could ignore information related to the United States. In addition, AP was a leader in photography, distributing more than 2,000 current images every day.
AP began as an agency burdened by its own national formula and that led to the founding in 1907 of what became known over the years as United Press International (UPI), which replicated the cooperative model with the best media in the world. The newspaper La Prensa of Buenos Aires was the first Latin partner of that new and prestigious cooperative, which today has nothing to do with the great global agency that it was until, at the end of the last century, it was rescued by Mario Vázquez Raña, a corrupt Mexican press magnate who ended up selling it to the sect of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.
The crisis in American newspapers is taking its toll on the Associated Press. The last setback occurred two weeks ago when the Gannett and McClatchy networks announced that they were terminating their contracts with AP and were beginning to depend exclusively on the journalistic resources of their own newsrooms (among these 230 newspapers, Gannett publishes USA Today and McClatchy The Miami Herald ). The poor payer’s excuse has been that in this way they will be able to invest those funds in improving and increasing their own network of journalists. A toast to the sun because Gannett between 2020 and 2023 has reduced its number of workers by 47%, accumulating losses worth more than a billion dollars in these years.
Logically, it is very bad news for AP because other networks and newspapers will cancel their contracts, weakening a cooperative that continues to lose members inside and outside the United States, even though they now say that the newspapers’ dues only cover 10% of their budget.
While most international agencies survive thanks to state subsidies, the PA cannot count on that lifeline because it goes against its reason for being as a private, independent and self-sufficient agency.
For the United States, the AP crisis further accelerates the “news desertification” of hundreds of ultra-local newspapers that will not have national and international information, because only twenty large North American newspapers have correspondents in Washington DC and some capitals of the United States. world.
This information impoverishment is evident, although the usual visionaries of total free say that this news reaches people today through social networks, confusing news and contrasted facts with the unverified and unreliable interested opinions that proliferate on the X, Facebook, Instagram or TikTok of the digital world.
However, this crisis also benefits large journalistic brands that, increasingly, sell their exclusive services to other media and companies, such as The New York Times.
This new market is also generating new and agile digital platforms such as ProPublica, Político, Semafor, Infobae or Axios, quality journalism brands with a transnational vocation.
The same can be said of individual journalists who feed super-specialized newsletters, although they lack the support of solvent newsrooms and the assistance of other journalists who add value, more to their analysis than to their information.
Finally, purists should be reminded that readers, audiences, and communities are looking for much more than “news,” no matter how important it may be. Years ago I asked Gloria Anderson, director of the New York Times Syndicate, the in-house agency that markets the newspaper’s content to clients around the world, what was the best seller. She, smiling and knowing that she would be wrong, asked me: What do you think? I answered: Kissinger’s columns? No; By no means the best sellers are the “non-fiction” articles in Modern Love, a Sunday section written by unknown and always different authors who deal with something as universal as the love experiences of anonymous people whose thematic richness has no borders: courtships , affairs, separations, loneliness, marriages, family crises, inheritances, relationships between children, parents and siblings…
And these features or reports are the essential complement to “pure and hard” news. That is, telling stories that “disturb, excite and make you think.” Journalism in its purest form.
