Home > Courses > JEM 560 Advanced Web Publishing > Kate Humphrey: Research paper



The Internet's Evolution of News Organizations

By Kate Humphrey

(Class presentation: Oct. 8, 2008)

“Men and women who trust you as a reporter provide you with the bulk of your news. Most of the time if comes from the well where you have been lowering your bucket for a long time, getting fresh, sweet facts from springs that never seem to run dry.”

-- Jack Bell, Associated Press

 

Introduction

This year’s incoming college class of 2012 is different from the past classes. ACT and SAT scores aside, a quick Google search shows that their mean birth year is 1990.

 For the purpose of this paper, the class of 2012’s smarts, looks, and talent are not relevant. This paper is about the technological advancements that have shaken and changed journalism down to its core.

In 1990, Microsoft launched Windows 3.0. In 1994, Yahoo was invented and founded by David Filo and Jerry Yang. In 1996 the first Palm Pilot was sold, rewriteable CD’s were introduced (CD-RW), and DVD’s went on sale. In 1995, ebay.com and amazon.com were introduced and “Toy Story” was the first fully computer animated movie ever produced. In 1997, the first MP3 player was invented and Google was invented in 1998.[1]

All this goes to show that by the time this year’s college freshman were finishing elementary school, modern technology was already speeding ahead at a profound rate.

News Organizations

News organizations were not excluded from the technological boom of the late 20^th century.

The Associated Press (AP) is a company, or organization, similar to newspapers or television stations as far as their distribution of information is concerned. It's the oldest and largest newsgathering organization in the world. A news bureau is, by definition, an office or regional department of a company specifically for gathering or distributing news. Newspapers are news organizations. Reuters and Agence France Press are organizations that have regional bureaus. For instance, the AP has bureaus in Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville, etc. The daily workings and core structure of all of these have changed so much that it is impossible to imagine a bureau without the Internet.

“Even the word ‘bureau’ has changed over the years,” said David Reiter, the executive editorial director for ABC News. “Not that long ago, one person couldn’t go out and do the shooting, the reporting, and the feeding of video into New York. The technology and the demand have come together to make these one-person bureaus realistic.”[2]

This was not always the case. According to the AP’s website, “In the last 20 years, AP has modernized its services worldwide with state-of-the-art equipment for the multimedia news world.” The summary goes on to state that the changes within the AP extend from news, photo, graphics and stock and broadcast services. The changes also include conversion of AP and the newspaper industry in their electronic handling of photos.

The last line is the crucial one. The AP is suggesting that a mass conversion of images and documents has occurred to change the journalism at its core. While the AP and its employees insist it is a good change, it is definitely a major one.

“For example, when going to a basketball tournament or a football bowl game,” said Mark Humphrey, AP photographer since 1982. “My trunk and back seat would be completely loaded with darkroom supplies, photographic enlargers, film dryers, etc., in addition to camera gear. Today, a laptop case has replaced all of the darkroom supplies.

“The resolution of the digital image has surpassed film,” Humphrey adds. “We produce better quality images with digital than we ever did with 35mm film.”[3]

The purpose of this paper is to trace the evolution of news bureaus through the advancement of technology. The main news bureau in question will be the AP, not to glorify the organization, but rather to trace the evolution through specific instances in the history of the world’s oldest and largest news organization.[4]

Associated Press

“Journalism hasn’t changed; only the tools have.”[5]

The AP provides coverage of news, sports, business, weather, entertainment, politics and technology in text, audio, video, graphics and photos to 15,000 news outlets and reaches more than one billion people around the world daily. Its services are distributed by satellite and the Internet to more than 120 nations.

Present day, the AP today has 4,000 employees and delivers news around the clock to more than 130 countries and 1 billion readers, listeners and viewers. AP has 242 bureaus and a budgeted revenue of more than $500 million. It serves virtually all of the daily newspapers in the United States as well as 5,000 radio and television outlets, plus thousands more in some 120 nations overseas. [6]

The AP dates its origins to a meeting of New York City publishers at a newspaper office in May 1848. Recent documents suggest that an inaugural meeting took place two years earlier, with the agreement to share news from the war with Mexico.

The mission of the AP’s Washington photo bureau is to “photograph the heartbeat of the national government”[7] but this transcends past the photo department and reaches into the mission of all parts of the AP bureaus.

Recent history of AP:[8]

As it applies to the Internet

 

1976:

AP introduces LaserPhoto and the first laser-scanned pictures for transmission, producing better picture quality. The revolutionary technology uses a photo paper processed with heat instead of chemistry and a laser light source instead of the decades-old lamp system.

 

1979:

AP is the first news organization to introduce an "electronic darkroom," a computer that not only transmits photos but also handles many tasks of the conventional chemical darkroom, such as cropping and adjusting brightness and contrasts.

 

1982:

AP establishes the first satellite color photo network with LaserPhoto II. The service improves the speed and quality of AP photos and marks the end of analog transmission over telephone lines, the technology that created Wirephoto.

1984:

AP becomes the first news organization to own a satellite transponder.

1986:

AP radio correspondents Bob Moon and Dick Uliano anchor five hours of live coverage after the Space Shuttle Challenger explodes 73 seconds after liftoff on January 28, killing six astronauts and school teacher-astronaut Christa McAuliffe.

1987:

AP introduces PhotoStream, a high speed collection and delivery network for photos that uses satellite circuitry and digital technology.

1990:

AP begins delivering photos via satellite to AP Leaf Picture Desks, on computer receiving terminals at newspapers.

1991:

AP launches GraphicsBank, the first online archive of graphics for television news programs.

1994:

AP introduces the AP News Camera 2000, the first of a series of digital cameras designed for photojournalists.

APTV, a global video newsgathering agency, is launched. Four years later, APTV merges with WorldWide Television News, forming APTN.

AP All News Radio, a 24-hour news and information network, is created to provide full-time news programming to radio stations.

AP launches AP AdSEND, a digital advertisement delivery service that transmits ads from advertisers and agencies directly to newspapers.

1996:

AP photographers cover a major event, Super Bowl XXX, using only digital cameras and no film.

AP produces a news desktop computer system for the British Broadcasting Corp. that combines text, audio and video, called the Electronic News Production System (ENPS).

AP launches The WIRE, a continuously updated online news service that combines text, photos, audio and video.

1998:

AP signs an agreement to provide online content to Yahoo!

2000:

From November 7 through November 8, AP resists a stampede by the television networks and other news organizations to call Florida, and thus the presidency, for George W. Bush.

AP Digital is founded to provide AP content to a range of online customers.

 

Content on the Internet: AP Style

“We believe that breaking news is worth more these days than it ever was. So breaking news is a premium business,” said Tom Curley, CEO of the AP, in a Nov. 2007 speech. He went on to express “that we must go forward with Web 2.0—all aspects of it—which is that our content should float. It should go where people want it, and we should get compensated for it and the way to [get] compensation is different than the way it’s been for 162 years.”[9]

Curley proposed to license AP content separately for each diferent platform on which it was used. Simply stated, he wanted to charge for online use. This idea was not widely accepted by AP board members, so online licensing was wrapped into the general assessment for AP member clients and has, in essence, remained free of charge for the moment.

AP claims the intended result of their online cooperation is a richer experience for readers and fresh profit opportunities for papers: “The joy is not in searching, the joy is finding the content that you want,” said Curley. “Well, we think we can make that much better and also that sets up a lot of possibilities in terms of revenue, especially around behavioral advertising.”[10]

Changes because of technology

Edgar Miller, past AP and United Press International (UPI) foreign correspondent, classified AP’s general interest as “news as a whole product”. “Are we toothpaste? Is this mouthwash that we are selling? No, it’s news. It’s not a commodity, it’s ephemeral,” Miller said of the desire to sell news as an entire package.[11]

“The only difference is in the delivery. The news is still there. It’s the delivery that is different. People are going to demand the type of journalism that can take the complicated business and put it in a form the reader can understand.”

As with almost anything, the evolution of the Internet comes with inherent pros and cons. The lists are subjective, but express the feelings of those in the business who were effected either way by the Internet.

Pros: News Organizations and Internet

Hiring freezes and outsourcing news from bureaus to free-lancers and stringers are definitely the trend in modern journalism. Even with this being so, CNN shocked the cynics when it announced in August that it would open news bureaus in ten additional major cities.[12] Time Warner Inc. owns CNN and will open these news bureaus in Denver, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Florida, and Philadelphia to name a few. The media giant is headquartered in Atlanta and already has bureaus in New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago and Los Angeles.[13]

In a similar type of story, ABC News will open five on-campus, multimedia news bureaus in the Fall, a May 2008 article proclaims. The move is intended to bring younger viewers and reporters into the field. The news organization will establish “online and broadcast technology news bureaus” at Arizona State and Syracuse Universities, as well as the Universities of Florida, North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Texas at Austin.[14]

Reliance on the Internet for political news throughout the 2004 election grew sixfold since the 1996 election, while the influence of newspapers dropped sharply, according to a study posted in “The USA Today”.[15]

Video

The Internet has also opened up the field for videos at every juncture. In March of 2006, the AP began offering an online video service in cooperation with Microsoft in which every clip is advertisement-supported. Fifteen or thirty-second slots precede a summary and individual stories which run a minute or so each.[16]

Rick Edmonds, Media Business Analyst, sees AP Online Video as entirely responsible of what the venerable news collective is all about in modern times: “a fast, multi-year transition to a wider array of products, heavy electronic emphasis and new business models.”[17]

Photography

For photographers, the technological advances are nothing but positive. “The time once spent in the darkroom processing film and making both black-and-white and color prints can now be spent shooting pictures,” said Humphrey. “We are able to spend more time gathering the information and less time distributing it.”[18]

For example, “After processing film and making a print, which would take, say, 30 minutes at the minimum, it then took approximately 10 minutes to transmit a black-and-white photo and 30 minutes to transmit a color photo,” Humphrey said. “Today with a digital camera and a laptop, after shooting the picture, it can be ingested into the computer, cropped, toned, captioned and transmitted in about five minutes.”[19]

Edmonds calls the AP’s evolution an “on-demand, user-controlled future” and Curley says “the Internet has become out new business environment, not just another medium for disribution.”[20] In The Online Journalist, the authors write that online access to wider sources of information usually means that more reporters have the ability to pursue more stories of greater interest to specific readers or viewers.[21]

The change to an Internet heavy journalism field means that stories can contain graphics, print, photos, videos, audio and slideshows. Whereas, in the past, print could only contain print and pictures and television could contain audio and video, Internet can hold everything. “Online journalism can expand the skill sets reporters have, making them more versatile and making their stories more interesting.”[22]

“With newspapers in America losing readership, they in turn are shrinking the sizes of their staffs and relying more on outside sources, such as the AP, for filling that void,” Humphrey said. “That means we now provide more information, with both words and photos, than we used to.”[23]

Cons: News Organizations and Internet

As previously mentioned, The New York Times reported that CNN announced in August 2008 they would be opening 10 new CNN bureaus in the US. This move would double the number of domestic cities where the cable news network had outposts, but these outposts would essentially rewrite the definition of a news bureau.

Rather than work from expensive bureaus, the new networks would run from borrowed office space from local news organizations and use laptops to file articles for the Internet and TV. Internet connections and cell phone cameras would be the preferred method of reporting.[24] That would have never been reported 20 years ago.

This leads to the obvious question: are we sacrificing quality for quantity? At most networks, “they can’t afford the bureaus, but they must have the news coverage,” Michael Rosemblum, a consultant who has helped television networks like the BBC adopt more condensed versions of traditionally large bureaus. “The easiest way to do it is to hand the journalist a camera, show then the ‘on’ and ‘off’ buttons, and tell them to go to work.”[25]

Aside from the general possible negatives that can come with the transition into the age of Internet, AP has battled with Google while the organization has frolicked seemingly harmoniously with Yahoo. AP has a licensing agreement, with confidential terms, with Yahoo and AOL. The Google relationship is more complicated.

In the 1990s, Reuters, the British news service and rival of AP, expanded its American presence aggressively on the Internet. AP attempted to limit its online services to member news organizations that pay the service fees to use AP material, but Reuters provided news for hundreds of websites. This prompted the AP to sell its news more openly on the Internet.[26]

Is Google essentially getting its information for free? “I wouldn’t characterize it that way,” Curley said. “We’ll, we’re not suing Google.”[27]

AP’s largest competitor, Reuters, has a quite open relationship with Google. Reuters has welcomed Google links and has tried hard to be featured in Google Finance. Might this lead to a negative relationship between such huge conglomerates: AP and Google? If it works, it would not be a bad partnership. In the first three months of 2008, Google recorded a 41.5 percent increase in online ad revenue. Over $1 billion was raked in by these advertisements. For a comparison, the best newspaper companies recorded increases that barely topped 10 percent during the same time period.[28] A Google spokesperson said that company would not comment on ongoing negotiations. Sources suspect Google and AP might be talking.

Then vs. Now

Curley claims AP has a few “commandments” for innovation: “use the technology to create more content and protect that content; create an AP video network; increase photos by at least 20 percent.”[29]

Quality

Bureaus like the AP are not just giving up because of the influx of information that comes with the age of the Internet. The AP Guidelines for Responsible Use of Electronic Services is typical of a bureau’s rules of Internet usage: “Apply the strictest standards of accuracy to anything you find on electronic services… Ask yourself, ‘Could this be a hoax?’ Do not publish… any electronic address without testing to see that it’s a working address and satisfying yourself that it is genuine. Apply, in other words, your usual news judgment.”[30]

 “The truly sophisticated understand: an accurate source and timely source of content is more valuable today than ever, given all the nonsense that’s out there electronically,” Curley said. “You may spend more time on something else that was related to the original break, but it’s like being a little bit pregnant—where was the news and who can you trust? And more and more, hopefully the answer is AP.”[31]

Deadlines

During the analog days, a motto within the AP was ‘A deadline every minute.’ “That is because we have subscribers all around the world and in dealing with all the different time zones, there would always be an AP member on deadline,” Humphrey explains. “Today, in the digital age, that motto is even more true because web sites produce products in real time, not just once a day.”[32]

Edmonds writes that the new AP will closely resemble a huge meta-database in which content is precisely tagged and retrievable on demand by clients to use however it suits them. Part of this ‘new AP’ was the service’s new youth-targeted product, ASAP, which was launched in September 2005.

Unlike the general Internet data, ASAP carries an extra charge. It has been picked up by 200 newspapers, alternative weeklies and youth-targeted publications. Jim Kennedy, AP’s director of strategic planning, calls this idea a “cross-media mindset.” Kennedy goes on to claim that while “AP has traditionally defined mainstream news, that’s not the full-breadth of what people want.”

One-man-band

The media, in general, is gearing towards a new breed of reporter; they have been labeled a “one-man band” of sorts. The style of citizen and backpack journalism has been around a few years; it is being more widely adopted as the reporters are proving they can act as their own producer, cameraman and editor.[33]

While some journalists may lament the changes, viewers do not have to suffer. “Technology is allowing us to pare down to that one person who can deliver the product,” said Nancy Lane, senior vice-president for newsgathering for CNN/U.S. “It completely changes how we can report.”

Technological improvements have helped cut back on the need for a large global staff and, after years of cutbacks, “digital technology may actually expand the reportorial reach of television news networks.”[34]

A precise of example of THEN v. NOW lies in Marcus Wilford, vice president for international digital at ABC News. When he was hired 20 years ago, the Paris news division’s bureau had three camera crews, three producers, two correspondents, drivers, and a chef in a house with a view of the Eiffel Tower. Today, the ABC News presence in Paris consists of one staff producer.[35]

What does it all mean?

The Internet does not have to mean the end of journalism. There is hope amongst the bureau closings and layoffs listed throughout this paper. That hope is the change that the one-man-band, citizen, backpack journalism has to offer to this previously traditional field.

The San Diego Union-Tribune, which is now up for sale, announced it would shut its four-person Washington bureau on Nov. 30. In the past two years, papers in San Francisco, San Diego, Des Moines, Pittsburgh, Hartford, Toledo, Houston, Salt Lake City, Montana, Wyoming, and Maine have all eliminated or cut back on their amount of Washington coverage.[36] The nation’s major newspaper companies, considered bureaus as well, lost nearly $4 billion in stock value in July 2008. This hurts, but it is not the end.

John McQuaid, of The American Prospect, finds two big trends that have changed journalism in Washington that can ultimately be applied to any bureau closing.

1)    Newspapers steadily lost touch with the interests of their dwindling pool of readers.

2)    Washington has changed.

“The faux-objective style of the traditional newspaper is increasingly useless” in today’s world, McQuaid said. “The result: the prestige beats in Washington, campaigns and the White House, are increasingly detached from reality. The coverage tends to be impressionistic and ‘insidery’, a weird mash-up of Maureen Dowd, Karl Rove, Drudge and cable news.”[37]

Quaid adds that, while D.C. bureaus were once considered essential, they now stand as a luxury.

Conclusion

“Realistically, I think that even when the economy picks back up, newspapers are not going to be able to meet the growing cultural change that is happening and get more serious about being online,” said Jason Kosena of the “The Colorado Independent”[38]

Times have changed. So has journalism. In the past, the general motto of journalism has been “Get it first. Get it fast. Get it right.” Just because technology has changed, that motto stands true. Technology makes it easier for journalists to do their job correctly, yet it has also changed the core of the job they originally signed up for. It is ultimately up to the individual and the news organization to make sure credibility is kept in this fast-paced and internet-driven world. The bureaus and organizations have changed substantially, but they are still the backbone of the world’s information. Just because it has changed doesn’t mean it is over.

 

 

Works Cited:

“25 years of technology: a look back, from DOS to VoIP. “, Student Resource Center, Thomson Gale, 30 April 2006, http://spxtech.tripod.com/id4.html (accessed 9/19/08).

Bass, Frank. “The Associated Press Guide to Internet Research and Reporting.” Perseus: Cambridge. 2001.

Burroughs, Henry D. “Close-ups of History: Three Decades through the Lens of an AP Photographer.” Missouri: London. 2007.

Callahan, Christopher. “A Journalist’s Guide to the Internet: The Net as a Reporting Tool.” Allyn and Bacon: Boston. 1999. P. 25.

Edmonds, Rick. “The New Associated Press: Under Construction.” 3/27/06.

http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=98708 (accessed 9/21/08).

Hadley, Bobby. “Houston, Seattle to Gain CNN News Bureaus.” 8/14/08.

http://bobbyhadley.wordpress.com/2008/08/14/houston-seattle-to-gain-cnn-news-bureaus/ (accessed 9/25/08).

Humphrey, Mark. AP Photographer. Personal Communication. 9/20/08.

Jesdanun, Anick. “Internet influence grew sixfold since 1996 campaigns.” USA Today. 2005. http://www.usatoday.com/news/bythenumbers/2005-03-07-poli-news-online_x.htm (accessed 9/23/08).

Kosena, Jason. “Colorado Independent: Newspapers Stocks Plummeting as the Vultures Keep Circling.” 7/18/08 http://coloradoindependent.com/4516/newspapers-stocks-plummeting-as-the-vultures-keep-circling (accessed 10/1/08).

McQuaid, John. “The Demise of the Washington News Bureau.” 9/19/08. http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_demise_of_the_washington_news_bureau (accessed 9/24/08).

Miller, Edgar. AP Foreign Correspondent. Personal Communication. 9/23/08.

Rampell, Catherine. “ABC news to Open Five University News Bureaus.” 5/12/08. http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/2993/abc-news-to-open-5-university-news-bureaus (accessed 9/23/08).

Reddick, Randy and Elliot King. “The Online Journalist: Using the Internet and Other Electronic Resources.” Harcourt: Fort Worth. 2001.

Ritchie, Donald A. “Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps.” University Press: Oxford. 2005. P. 132.

Stelter, Brian. “TV Networks Rewrite the Definition of a News Bureau.” New York Times. 8/13/08. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/13/business/ media/13bureaus. html?ref=technology (accessed 10/1/08).

The Associated Press. www.ap.org. Accessed 9/25/08.

Weisenthal, Joseph. “Interview: Tom Curley, CEO, Associated Press.” 12/5/07. http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-interview-tom-curley-ceo-associated-press/ (accessed 9/23/08).

 

---

About JPROF.com | Who is JPROF? | Contact us
All of the words and images on this site are copyrighted and may not be used without the permission.
Copyright © Jim Stovall 2005
FreeFind.com provides search technology for this website.