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EYE ON EUROPE |
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SHORT-CIRCUITING?
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Does the AP really know
which way is UP?
By MICHAEL JOHNSON
of TheColumnists.com
When I started reading newspapers in the 1950s, I wondered why they printed “(UP)” at the start of a story. I had already read the headline, which was up from the story, not down. Some people must be pretty stupid, I thought.
What I couldn’t understand was why other stories directed the reader to “AP” instead of “UP”. Which way was AP?
Like most people, I had no idea how news was gathered. Eventually I learned about United Press and its loftier competitor Associated Press and decided to shoot for a career in the wires. The AP in San Francisco hired me and sent me to Charleston, West Virginia, as a test of my loyalty. I still remember the call coming in to me at the Hayward Daily Review. “Mike, you’re in,” said Bob Eunson, the venerable San Francisco bureau chief.” Just a few years later I achieved my aim of becoming a Cold War correspondent in Moscow.
This was the beginning of a long-term love affair. The AP was my second home and second family for nine years. AP journalism seemed refreshingly unbiased after two years of serving a mad publisher’s fixation on supermarket advertising and a range of pet peeves. The AP was clean and straight.
Most people still have no understanding of the news business and therefore fail to appreciate the importance of protecting this basic building block of the global information flow. The AP today supplies news to more people than any other source, and no competitor comes close.
UP became UPI but that didn’t help it match AP standards. With insufficient staff in place, it always ran a poor second. One UPI bureau displayed a rather bleak slogan: “We’re never first but we’re always wrong.”
My admiration for AP values has remained undiminished, and many of my best friends are AP veterans dating from our overnight shiftwork in New York and our bouncing around the globe to work in various bureaus.
Throughout my working life in editorial management I retained a bias in favor of job applicants who had AP in their background. I was never disappointed. They had integrity, they could write, and they didn’t sit around waiting for the muse to visit them.
Today we veterans are not a happy lot. In fact we are appalled at the slick, MBA-style management that has taken over the once-idealistic AP cooperative. Like their owners in the U.S. newspaper business, AP management is trying to fix the numbers without apparent regard for the esprit de corps. It is happening slowly and steadily, like pulling the wings off flies.
The foreign staff is a shadow of its former
self. Over the past couple of years, bureau chiefs of long experience
(Rome, London, Tokyo, Paris, among others) have been summarily
forced into early retirement. The domestic system has undergone
a similar shakeout. Overseas, seasoned internationalists are
being replaced with lesser-paid locals. This is precisely the
route UPI travelled into oblivion.
But there are stirrings among AP loyalists. The crisis has found
a champion in its former star foreign correspondent and ex-chief
editor of the International Herald Tribune, Mort Rosenblum, now
suddenly a thorn in the AP’s side. Last year Mort received
a phone call informing him that he had decided to retire.
Since then he has thought long and hard about the importance of objective information in a turbulent world, and is trying to alert the AP Board to the slippery slope on which it is engaged. A published author, he has a new book in progress on the subject of global news gathering.
“We can’t hope for security, let alone prosperity, without a gold-standard source of basic news,” he wrote in a widely circulated open letter last week. “For a century and a half, that has been AP’s role. Now this is at risk.”
His warning to AP Chairman Burl Osborne: “AP’s present course represents a grave danger to a world that badly needs it.”
Rosenblum’s open letter, and an earlier letter to Osborne, articulate the fears of many dedicated reporters and editors caught in the adjustment of newspapers to the realities of a changing communications business--mainly the 24-hour rolling news on television and the fast-evolving formats available free on the internet.
AP veterans seem to have been waiting for someone to frame the current dangers into a coherent argument. Rosenblum came along and AP staff and retirees are responding in large numbers. Rosenblum’s letter to Chairman Osborne was posted on the AP’s retirees’ website and triggered 114 replies in the first 24 hours.
Other waves of response have come to Rosenblum personally, the greatest reaction to anything he has written in his long career, he says.
A typical response has been how regrettable it is that adjustments are being forced through without worrying about the impact on AP’s ability to protect the public trust. One current staffer wrote to Rosenblum: “The sacrifices, loyalty and dedication of the individual human element have been forgotten. It’s a sad day indeed.”
The hard business approach to managing a system of self-motivated individuals has produced the greatest clash of viewpoints. “AP is a .org, not a .com, with a nobler purpose,” Rosenblum wrote to Osborne. “Reporters’ performance is measured now in output, words per shift, rather than by what matters.” New York editors, he went on, “rewrite copy and impose guidance that is often based on misperceptions. Arbitrary word limits leave out context. Stories are spiked without explanation.”
The AP writer’s goal, he wrote, “is not a payceck, but the satisfaction of getting the story right.”
No one argues that change should be ignored or resisted. “Change is the only constant,” goes the business mantra. Even the newspapers that own the AP cooperative understand the need to be financially sound.
But the groundswell of complaints over high-handed management intervention seems to have led to deeper troubles that may fester for a generation. As one staffer put it, “Morale has not been this low for 30 years.”
Rosenblum quotes one AP editor based abroad as saying bitterly: “They’ve taken an organic thing and tried to make it into a machine. It doesn’t work.”
©2006 by Michael Johnson. The illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. East, San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted March 27, 2006.
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