ON THE JOB
Can the AP Go Global?
As the story goes, Mahatma Gandhi was released from an Indian prison in 1932 in the middle of the night to elude the press. He was taken to a remote railroad station where darkness obscured his identity. But then an intrepid Associated Press reporter named Jim Mills appeared out of nowhere.
It was not the first time the reporter had tracked down the holy man to land a scoop. An impressed Gandhi quipped: “I suppose when I go to the Hereafter and stand at the Golden Gate, the first person I shall meet will be a correspondent of The Associated Press.”
AP emblazons that apocryphal quote on T-shirts as an emblem of its huge international footprint. We can safely assume that the news agency did not follow Gandhi or anyone else into the after life. AP, however, wants to enhance its influence on Earth.
Flat revenue and competing news sources on the Internet have forced AP into action. The nonprofit cooperative needs to make more money to maintain a gigantic newsgathering operation that produces twenty million words and a thousand images a day. Circulation of its 1,500 newspaper members is falling and the U.S. market is saturated. But AP believes it can expand abroad, and in November launched a global assault on its main rival, Reuters. AP’s aim is to become the leading news service in the world, not just the United States.
The plan involves oiling a creaky international machine to better use its 242 bureaus abroad. AP wants to make its report so dazzling that it can add to its 8,500 existing customers overseas. “We feel we do a very good job in the U.S. but the world is a place where we already have people and we haven’t really attacked our structure there since World War Two,” says Kathleen Carroll, AP’s executive editor.
It won’t be easy. AP finds change difficult, in part because it can never be free of the needs of its members. Still, the plan to revitalize the behemoth involves carving up the world into four regional editing hubs that can quickly handle dispatches in the same time zone as the reporters filing stories. No longer will New York be the epicenter of international operations. These geographic centers will enjoy the added advantage of grouping photography, text, and video staff people under one roof to better pool resources.
To further maximize potential, AP is releasing foreign bureau chiefs from marketing duties to let them concentrate on pursuing stories instead. Experienced salesmen will then be hired to figure out what foreign customers want. AP has identified sports and business as growth areas and has noticed that many overseas clients don’t like the U.S. slant to news. As part of the plan to change this, AP is placing greater emphasis on local expertise and languages, never its strength.
While the international approach might seem revolutionary to many of its 3,700 employees, AP is basically copying the route Reuters took twenty-five years ago when it morphed from a dowdy British company to a global brand.
Necessary? Yes. Ambitious? Absolutely. Realistic? Perhaps.
The outline of the overhaul is in place, though management is still finessing details. Executives will not reveal how much is being invested; “plenty” is all Carroll will say. But they have indicated that they do not plan aggressive advertising, à la Bloomberg, whose financial service rampaged out of nowhere in the 1990s to rattle Reuters. AP seems to think it can win customers by adding a handful of staff people and encouraging them to be more proactive.
Timing could work against AP. This new venture comes as media across Europe are hurting financially and cutting back on wire services, not adding them. Anti-Americanism is rising, too. Will AP’s reputation for fairness, accuracy, and speed transcend cultural chauvinism?
If anyone can jolt the lumbering giant, board members argue, it’s Tom Curley, the former USA Today publisher. Curley emerged as the surprise choice for AP president and chief executive last year, eclipsing candidates from within the organization, when Louis Boccardi announced he was leaving the job after eighteen years. The board wanted someone who understood how to make money and confront the changing media landscape. “We were looking for a full appreciation for news and a full appreciation for business,” explains board chairman Burl Osborne, the publisher emeritus of The Dallas Morning News.
Soon after taking over in June 2003, Curley dismantled an unwieldy chain of command whereby dozens of bureau chiefs reported directly to the president. He instead installed a blanket of vice presidents to bring decision-making closer to the field. He began an aggressive push for more enterprise reporting, and deployed star writers to an international investigative unit based in New York. To encourage original reporting, management dangles a weekly $500 prize for the best story and is paring marginal tasks like entering high school basketball scores. “We want to make sure we’re essential to whoever is defining essential, so that AP will be the agency of choice,” Curley explains.
The global assault, a centerpiece in his overhaul, actually began two years ago with the creation of an Asia editing center in Bangkok. Curley is accelerating the process, with plans this spring to open a Europe-Africa desk, based in London with eighteen employees. An Americas desk comes next year, followed by one in the Middle East.
While divvying the world into time zones, Curley is encouraging regional beats. In Asia and Europe, for example, journalists are adopting transnational themes such as medicine, business, and terrorism. This new regional approach is supposed to deliver comprehensive articles, wrapping up cross-border developments on global stories. Correspondents will still cover French, German, and British diplomacy efforts on Iraq, for example, but the London desk will now deliver a Europe-wide article combining the separate national strands.
Even word choice is under scrutiny. “We call soccer, soccer. The rest of the world calls it football,” says Carroll. “We’re more U.S.-focused on sports and business, and these are areas that we’re looking at how to flesh out.”
The man chosen to sell this new approach to the world is Ian Ritchie, the former chief executive of AP’s international television service, who showed particular savvy during the Iraq war, when he provided custom video packages to Middle Eastern clients. Now, as head of the new AP International, he must expand revenue in the rest of the world. AP sees potential for expansion in Asia, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union. The Asia business plan is already bearing fruit; last October, the AP news report won more play there than AFP and Reuters combined. AP hopes to build on this strength, positioning itself for when huge emerging markets open up in China and India.
Being associated with the world’s lone superpower, however, can provoke suspicion in Europe these days. France’s state-subsidized media are faithful to Agence France-Press, for example, and in Britain, Reuters is the agency of choice. Hurried editors know they can lift Reuters directly, rather than laboriously altering AP’s American spelling and news approach. “AP tends to be very accepting, or less skeptical, about everything that comes out of the White House and Washington,” says Raymond Whitaker, the foreign editor of The Independent on Sunday. “It doesn’t quite fit with the way we see things.”
It’s questionable whether European newspapers even want the meatier file that AP envisages. Europe lacks a culture of reliance on wire services for big stories. The Daily Telegraph, for instance, ignored a November exclusive that AP is particularly proud of, which traced recent terror attacks to Afghan training camps. The newspaper likewise expressed little enthusiasm for another AP inspiration, pan-European coverage of head-scarf controversies involving Muslim women.
AP may have further trouble whipping its weary ground troops into action. The tyranny of the news cycle leaves little time to pursue scoops. Some chronically understaffed AP bureaus are struggling just to provide basic coverage, and even major centers like Nairobi, Johannesburg, Jerusalem, and Beijing have gone months with slots unfilled. At press time, the lone position in Canada had been empty since December.
The strain particularly affects third-world hubs that process copy from several countries. Stringers often have poor English and questionable reporting skills, meaning editors must spend hours chasing facts to fill the holes. Add lighter paychecks to this burden, and the grumbling grows louder. AP expatriate salaries are already on the low side, and now the cost of living allowance has shrunk in some hardship posts.
AP, one insider jokes, is like a mother. She’s reliable. She’s always there for you. She’s easy to take for granted. But you need her. Will the world agree? Curley is giving himself another three years to “see what we can do,” although he expects the overhaul to last much longer. He warns skeptics to remain vigilant. “We believe that AP will be able to provide the content that people will snap up,” he says. “If they don’t, it’s at their peril.”
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