Aside from timeliness, however, I feel little value is added. AP writethrus provide good background but it still takes a local presence and voice to add value and make the story complete. Congrats, btw on the Knight grant — Spot.us is an excellent idea!

I agree with your argument against the HUGE reliance on wire that these dailies have sunk to. It is awful. For writers and readers and, it could be reasoned, our democracy, it is a nightmare.

But i don’t see these papers that have continuously sacked their newsrooms making that investment again. It seems, your model wouldn’t provide interested, linked-in reporters and editors that are accountable to the home communities they would be serving, either.

I love your model for (national) local news, but I don’t see how it would replace the real need that wires have sought to fill…

It’s basically a business issue for the print side. Right now, a lot of people who still pay to subscribe to print papers use that as their primary news channel. And yes, we’re talking mainly about older folks at this point, so eventually this issue will, um, “die off.” But for now and for the next decade or two, we’ll still have a large share of print-focused subscribers.

Meanwhile news orgs have decimated their own staffs.

So if they don’t buy AP stories, where would most of them get international coverage? High-level national coverage? Virtually none of that would appear in the print edition. It matters less online, since there are many sources of that news online. But for print subscribers, it’s an issue.

At a lot of news orgs, even though they don’t get a ton of direct revenue from print subscribers, it’s an important metric they tout to advertisers, and it helps them keep their print ad rates up.

So if they were to pull AP content entirely, they might be sacrificing support for their print ad rates. And down goes your house of cards. If you don’t care whether the papers collapse entirely, then that’s no big deal. Personally, I think that would hurt a lot of communities, so I’d prefer a less drastic solution.

What I’d like to see would be for news orgs to do a lot more serious work to localize and elaborate upon AP stories. Right now they usually either don’t touch them at all (which I think is little better than running press releases) or they rework the lead to create a superficial local angle.

In other words, it would be great if they would use AP stories as a basic ingredient, not the whole damn pie.

And they sure as hell shouldn’t run unaltered (or barely altered) AP stories on their sites. That’s pointless.

Will mull this over more and blog it later. Good points you make.

- Amy