Print fades at the AP as buyouts and AI reshape the future of news

The Associated Press, the world’s largest news organization, plans to offer buyouts to an unknown number of its U.S.-based journalists as it shifts its focus from print to visual journalism. 

The cuts come as the AP seeks new revenue streams, mostly from companies investing in artificial intelligence.

“We’re not a newspaper company and we haven’t been for quite some time,” Julie Pace, executive editor and senior vice president of the AP, said in an interview.

Buyouts

The exact number of buyouts is unclear, but the union that represents AP newsgatherers said more than 120 of its members received offers.

“The AP employs hundreds of talented journalists who are willing and able to adjust to the changing media landscape,” the News Media Guild said in a statement.

The buyouts are part of a fundamental shift away from the AP’s traditional mission of providing news from around the country and the world to virtually every newspaper in the U.S. The news service will concentrate instead on presenting its reporting through other digital media.

In that sense, the AP is meeting news consumers where they already spend most of their time. At least 86% of adults in the U.S. said they at least get some of their news from a smartphone, computer or tablet, according to Pew Research.

“We can all see the direction that the news industry is going, so I don’t necessarily fault them for that,” Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, told Straight Arrow News. “I do hope that whatever jobs are lost on the print side are made up for on the visual side, and that this doesn’t become a broader downsizing because the AP’s work is particularly crucial these days.”

Already, the company has doubled the number of its video journalists in the U.S. over the last four years.

Robert Picard, a fellow at the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford, told SAN that moving toward digital journalism was “kind of inevitable” for the AP.

However, “oftentimes, buyouts are a first step, and what follows is layoffs,” he said. “So, I hope that’s not the direction this is going.”

Pace said the AP’s goal is to reduce its global staff by less than 5%. She said potential layoffs depend on how many employees accept buyout offers.

Picard’s biggest concern is who will be leaving the AP.

“They’re still going to continue doing their big national and international coverage, but who’s going to cover Iowa?” he said. “Who’s going to cover Idaho? Are they going to reduce the statehouse coverages all around the country, and when that happens, is there somebody going to be able to step up in those states and provide regular coverage?”

The economics

In the news industry, where the eyes go, so do the dollars.

Founded in the mid-1800s, the AP has long depended on print journalism — especially the newspapers that pay for its wire service — for revenue. However, nearly 40% of papers across the country have disappeared.

Of the ones that are left, nearly half are owned by a handful of companies, which have often stepped in with a goal of cutting spending. With 24 of the nation’s 25 largest newspapers reporting a decline in circulation last year, the AP has increasingly become a luxury that many publishers cannot afford.

“It’s sort of an economic imperative for them,” Picard said. “The number of daily newspapers that subscribe [to the AP] has been going down as newspapers have disappeared. The newspapers that are still using AP, and it is a primary for daily newspapers, are taking less and less of the material and that’s because they are printing fewer pages, and so the growth area for them has been digital.”

Over the past four years, newspaper revenue for the AP has dropped 25%. Two major newspaper companies — including Gannett, the largest publisher in the country — dropped their AP memberships. Now the third-largest newspaper publisher in the U.S., is trying to get out of its contract with the news service.

The AP is seeking new revenue sources that, just a few years ago, would have been unimaginable.

Last month, for instance, it agreed to sell its data on U.S. elections to Kalshi, the world’s largest prediction market. It also is moving more into direct-to-consumer products, such as APNews.com, and is increasing its presence on social media, where AP journalists sometimes appear on camera to speak about their stories.

“We’re really trying to embrace that because I do think it’s vital when there is so much misinformation out there,” Pace said.

Impact of AI

The AP also sees artificial intelligence as an important revenue source for the future.

In 2023, the company leased part of its text archive to OpenAI. And last year, it launched on the digital hub Snowflake Marketplace to license data directly to companies building their own AI systems.

The foray into AI is part of the AP’s broader strategy of seeking partnerships in emerging technologies.

“If you can think of a large technology company, they are a customer of ours,” Kristin Heitmann, senior vice president and chief revenue officer of the AP, said in an interview.

Last year, for example, the AP signed a contract to deliver news to consumers through Google’s AI system, Gemini.

The AP also launched AP Intelligence, which sells data to financial and advertising sectors.

What’s not known is how far the AP will go into AI. Fewer than 10% of major newspapers use AI to produce news stories, but “news organizations definitely need to be thinking about an AI strategy,” Timothy Lee, author of the newsletter Understanding AI, told SAN.

So far, the AP’s dalliances with AI do not directly relate to the output of news. But that could change for an organization that publishes roughly 1,100 stories per day.

“AI has the potential to be used for good and for evil alike,” Stern said. “I have no idea what the AP’s plans are. I doubt that an organization as reputable as the AP is going to allow AI to generate news stories or take the place of journalists and journalism.”

Others say AI may have a place in the future of news.

“There’s a lot of journalism work that is rote work that is not really creative writing, if you will,” Picard said. “That can probably be handled by AI once they put the information into it.”

He used sports as an example.

“Doing what happened in a ball game last night, which is basically a rundown of the box score, that it can probably do,” Picard said. “But it can never give you the kind of great sports writing Roger Angell [of The New Yorker] and other great sports writers were able to give over the years and commentary and things of that sort.”

Lee somewhat agreed.

“I just don’t think the models are anywhere close to good enough even to write a boilerplate article about routine news,” he said. “And certainly, if you’re trying to do any kind of analysis or investigative reporting or something like this, nowhere near ready to do anything.”

Still, the AP’s shift from traditional print journalism to new formats isn’t necessarily a negative, analysts said

“I can understand as both businesspeople and storytellers why they want to produce media in the formats that are both more lucrative and more popular, more widely consumed,” Stern said. “So, I don’t necessarily have a problem with that shift, as long as the content doesn’t suffer. I’m less concerned with the medium and more concerned with the depth and breadth of reporting.”

Picard echoed that sentiment.

“The storytelling will change as it goes more and more into digital and video,” he said. “Does that deny people information? One doesn’t know. It depends on how it’s done. Some places, it’s done pretty well. Other places, it’s not done very well, and they miss a lot of other things that should be in a story.”

Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief