AP launches new service aimed at younger readers
The new service will produce original news using text, photos, video and audio, to be offered to U.S. newspapers that are members of the 157-year-old news cooperative. The service will be called asap, pronounced “a-s-a-p.”
Ted Anthony, a 37-year-old former national and foreign correspondent for AP, will oversee the news service and its current staff of 20, a number he expects to rise to 25 by the beginning of next year. The service has reporters in Denver, Los Angeles and New York.
The AP, a news cooperative owned by U.S. newspapers and broadcasters, produced a prototype of the service last fall after hearing from its membership about the need to reach younger readers, Anthony said. “The industry kept telling the AP about the need to attract people from this audience,” he said.
The service will cull some breaking news from the AP’s main news feeds, but the vast majority of the material on asap will be produced by its own staff, Anthony said. He said the company decided to set up a separate unit in order to allow the most flexibility in choosing what kind of medium to tell each story.
On its first day of operation, asap featured a first-person account by a U.S. Marine serving in Iraq, a memoir by a reporter going mountain biking with President Bush, and a photo essay on Hurricane Katrina.
Newspapers can use the material from asap on their own Web sites or in the print versions of their newspaper. Ruth Gersh, director of online services for AP, said about 200 papers had signed up so far for the service, but she declined to say how much they were paying for it.
The newspaper industry is trying to reach out to younger readers in other ways as well. Several have launched free papers such as RedEye in Chicago, an offshoot of the Tribune Co.’s flagship newspaper, the Chicago Tribune.
As newspaper readers become older and as more young people turn to the Internet for news, luring the 70 million readers in the 18-34 age group is seen by many in the newspaper business as the most urgent imperative for the industry’s future.
John Morton, an independent newspaper industry analyst based in Silver Spring, Md., called the AP’s new initiative “well done,” though he also said “whether it will work, we won’t know for years and years.”
Gersh said the asap service would likely evolve during its initial development phase, which will run through the end of 2006, as the news cooperative receives and incorporates feedback from its newspaper membership.
Gersh said the newspapers will have a “broad license” to use the text and online material from asap “in any combination of ways that they think best,” Gersh said. “We expect them to be experimenting with it.”
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On the Net:
http://asap.ap.org