The Associated Press newsroom, a few blocks west of Madison Square Garden, looks a lot like any newsroom, only much bigger -- 100,000 square feet, just smaller than the area of two football fields.

SEEKING SOLUTIONS

This is the second of an occasional series of articles examining solutions that news organizations are developing to address the range of challenges facing media today. For the first installment, click here.

My tour guide, Ruth Gersh, director of online services for AP Digital, points out a few landmarks: a Latin American desk that processes only news from that part of the world; a recently formed entertainment section with three clocks set to Hollywood, London and Hong Kong time. So where is the big online work space? It is a small space, actually. Most of the online segment of the AP is now simply interwoven into the individual news desks.

That is a sign of the times at AP. The massive and far-flung newsgathering apparatus hasn't needed radical changes, Gersh said, but dissemination "has been turned upside down. We had it exactly backwards." Now it is the online version first; adaptations for newspapers and broadcast come later.

Kathleen Carroll, AP executive editor

Case in point: The day before my December visit, air marshals shot and killed an uncooperative passenger in Miami. The AP moved a whole succession of online versions with "five Ws" kinds of leads. By evening, the service produced a separate, after-the-fact story for the next day's newspapers with a lead highlighting that, in all the years that there have been air marshals, this was the first time they had drawn their guns and killed someone.

For the AP, where reporters and editors long have operated faster than fast, this part may not be as much of a stretch as it is for newspapers, which face weaning themselves from the "daily miracle" cycle and swallowing hard as they scoop themselves online with breaking stories.

asap

I Was asap'ed NEAR THE END of my preparation of these articles, my phone rang with an interview request from asap. The reporter, Caryn Rousseau from Kansas City, had proposed to her editors a Q-and-A on McClatchy's purchase of Knight Ridder. Her first question: How could a David swallow a Goliath several times its size? My answer: It went to the bank and borrowed a lot of money. We went on like this, but briefly, and the result was a 10-inch story free of earnings multiples, household growth rates and other esoterica. Not a bad approach for a younger reader with a degree of curiosity about the news industry, I thought. Not a bad approach, period.

But a second part of the direction in which AP is headed is less intuitive and more of a challenge. Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll puts it this way: "Our bread and butter is breaking news. We don't ever take our eye off that ball, and it is our entry ticket for everything else... But a fair chunk of the organization is now doing discretionary news. The choices are dictated by what's wanted, so, for instance, a robust health and science report is part of it."

It sounds as if the AP is bolstering some of the subject areas that are taking hits in the successive waves of newspaper staff cuts so far this decade. That is part of what’s happening, said Carroll. "Good mid-sized papers are being forced to make a lot of strategic decisions about what only they can do and should continue to do." The local, local, local answer makes sense, but quasi-national health and science specialists often end up on the list of good things a regional can no longer afford.

Ruth Gersh, director of online services, AP Digital

For Carroll, this has meant several years, now, of moving generalists to subject-specialist slots as positions come open. She is quick to add, however, that "they still know what to do when the plane goes down."

The other forefront, Carroll said, is new kinds of content for the Web. "Take photos. Historically, magazines changed what news photography was all about. You had to get past just transcribing the event. The Web will change it yet again, but how, I'm not sure."

For now, that can mean logical next steps such as asking photographers to think in terms of galleries rather than just one or two best shots for print publication. Same with video -- there is a movement back to "more raw and less packaged" material.

Senior AP executives toss out a range of examples of where the new coverage opportunities can be.  Chief strategist Jim Kennedy, the AP's vice president and director of strategic planning, offers that it may be as simple as counting the votes at the state legislature as newspapers trim their statehouse efforts. (AP practices its own form of federalism, with state bureaus operating relatively independently and offering content only to member news organizations.)

The AP's New York newsroom

CEO Tom Curley mentioned that cutbacks in international efforts, both by newspapers and broadcast outlets, have made the case that AP should have more reporters, photographers and senior editors driving that coverage. In fact, AP has been bucking the industry trend, increasing news staff by roughly 200 in the last several years.

Another dimension Carroll discussed is not just reporting on the rest of the world, but for the interests of international clients -- getting more soccer in the sports report, for instance. In entertainment, for another example, "we are exploring with customers more coverage of Arabic music. Or in the case of Bollywood [the Indian movie industry], there is an Indian diaspora all around the world, but we are trying to figure out whether this should be part of our coverage or whether they can get it somewhere else."

As with any program of expansion and experimentation, there are bound to be bumps. After I talked with Carroll in December, a friend who is national editor at a large metro expressed some skepticism that AP's coverage of specialty topics is as strong as that available from the New York Times or Los Angeles Times-Washington Post news services.

Tom Curley, Associated Press CEO

When I asked in a follow-up interview by phone if the AP wants to go head-to-head with The New York Times in science coverage, Carroll bristled. "Sure, why wouldn't we? We absolutely want to be held to the highest standard in the industry." On breaking news, it is a win-some/lose-some game with the national papers, she added, "but we are the windshield more often than the bug." The Dubai ports story, for instance, was original to AP, and "we have owned it," Carroll asserted.

New products don't get snapped up. asap, the AP's new youth-targeted initiative, is a premium service -- thus, an added expense to any subscriber. With about 200 takers to date, seven months after launch, it is fair to say the majority of newspapers have yet to embrace it as a showcase attraction in their quest for younger readers.

Getting on with the new also doesn't eliminate troublesome old business. The arrangement by which AP member affiliates are asked to feed breaking stories to the service has long been a source of friction, aggravated now that there are so many more 24/7 news organizations that would prefer not to see "their" stories in advance of their own published versions.

"There has been close to 80 years of fussing about that," Carroll said, "and it isn't going away."

David Guttenfelder's asap photo gallery

Last year, a version of another perennial was floated -- that newspapers now have the technology to exchange stories directly and bypass the middleman AP. Mochila, another variation on the alternative service idea, debuts next week. "That conversation has existed for a long time," said Curley, "but it ignores that a lot of content -- about half on any wire -- is AP-generated." Plus, exchanged stories would require a good deal of sorting and editing. And that's a large part of the logic of the AP as a news collective in the first place.

It is beyond the scope of this story to do a big assessment of how the changes are playing out with the rank and file. Sandy Johnson, the AP's Washington bureau chief, said, "I'm completely on board with the push to digital... The trick, of course, is not to lose good journalism along the way... We are used to 24/7 and multiple outlets, so that part is easy. But resources are an issue. Our infrastructure for producing multimedia is behind the times."

Jim Kennedy, AP director of strategic planning

Carroll's account squares with Johnson's, and also with what I have been hearing from editors at other companies: Right now, there is more excitement in the field about doing new things with multimedia than there is capacity back in New York to produce all the good ideas.  
There are some holdouts, but veterans are well-represented among those excited about trying something new. Carroll mentioned Denis Gray and David Longstreath, a team that has been in Bangkok "forever," who pulled out all the stops with words, video and recorded sound to cover orphan refugees in Myanmar and a military celebration in Laos, 30 years after "victory" over the United States.
 
The AP's no-Web-site-of-our-own policy makes it challenging to locate and sample this kind of work. One good concentration is in the archives section of asap, the youth-targeted service, where multimedia extravaganzas are the norm. There, you are more likely to find relatively age-neutral news content like David Guttenfelder's photo essay on the APEC summit in Korea or an audio critique of past and present military recruitment ads rather than celebrity buzz and sex, drugs and rock'n'roll.

THE FUTURE

So, Will It Work? AP executive editor Kathleen Carroll provided this answer: "It's clear that people want and need information about the world -- from their neighborhoods to communities across the state, country and globe. So if the AP gives them reliable information and the context to understand it... if we deliver it in all kinds of formats -- text, photos, video, sound, maps, interactives -- and make it available through newspapers, computers, mobile phones or other devices... then we'll succeed."

There appear to be some dangers to AP's multi-year strategy for transforming itself. If metro papers find themselves both intensely local and financially strapped, they may be less inclined to display in print or online a comprehensive international report or spring for new premium products. Pricing negotiations are a way of life at the service, but they could get more numerous and difficult (though Curley promises, ultimately, a simplified pricing structure).

AP is sheltered from Wall Street pressure and does not directly feel the pain of such upstarts as Craigslist. The service also has maneuvering room -- something that public newspaper companies might not enjoy -- since it doesn't owe anyone a high margin return. However, it does need earnings to pay for expensive new technology and carry the startup costs of new products and services.

Weakened business basics at old media obviously could curtail AP's editorial ambitions. But mirroring the industry itself, hoping online can take up some slack, the service could cover some contraction among its traditional clients if demand and income from national newspaper sites, along with Yahoo!, AOL and Google, grow robustly.

My sense is that the AP focused itself on the moving target of the digital future somewhat earlier than most of its client newspapers. The wire service has also come close to placing a pure bet that strong content, accessible in the right ways, is the road to a viable future. Indeed, that is all the AP has to sell, and its fortunes can be watched as an industry bellwether.