Early Tuesday morning, legendary New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner was taken to the hospital in Tampa, Fla. At 9:44 a.m. EDT, the Associated Press sent out a news alert that Steinbrenner had died — a report that was cited within minutes by Fox News, MSNBC and ESPN.
CNN, though, didn’t report that Steinbrenner had died until 9:59 a.m., when Alina Cho cited a statement from Steinbrenner’s family.
Fifteen minutes isn’t a very long time; by lunchtime CNN and its competitors were busy dissecting Steinbrenner’s life and legacy, and it’s unlikely that many people outside of the news business noticed or particularly cared which network said what at the beginning.
But 15 minutes can feel like 15 years amid the blare of breaking news — and the lag served as a reminder that CNN and the AP have gone their separate ways and raised the question of whether CNN is paying the price.
CNN had used AP materials and services since its debut in 1980, but it cut ties with the news service on June 21, nine days before its contract with AP expired.
In announcing that decision, CNN Worldwide President Jim Walton said that “the content we offer will be distinctive, compelling and, I am proud to say, our own.” AP spokesman Paul Colford, for his part, said at the time that “it is unfortunate that CNN’s viewers will no longer have access to the breaking news and worldwide reporting resources of the Associated Press, the gold standard in journalism.”
When asked about the Steinbrenner announcement, both the AP and CNN were quick to engage in further sniping.
“AP staffers have been watching with interest and amusement how CNN, which is supposedly a breaking-news organization, is now routinely late on stories without AP services and also has to devise ways to get at stories that AP has already made available to CNN’s competitors and AP members,” Colford said. “The mounting evidence online and on TV suggests that CNN’s audience is being shortchanged.”
CNN spokesman Nigel Pritchard, however, said that it’s “highly unlikely we would have gone ahead” with the initial AP account of Steinbrenner’s death because it didn’t cite a verified source.
Pritchard said that a TV affiliate gave CNN “an unsourced heads-up” about Steinbrenner’s death, and a CNN assignment editor in New York confirmed that with Steinbrenner’s family. Pritchard said that process is “standard to our editorial guidelines. … CNN will always try and get separate verification if no sources are given.”
Pritchard noted that the AP has quoted CNN in its stories since the two parted ways, such as in a report about Virgin Airways stranding passengers on the airport tarmac in Hartford, Conn. Citations of other news organizations aren’t uncommon, he notes. “We quote them, they quote us — it happens.”
Walton’s June internal memo portrayed the end of its relationship with AP as part of a “content-ownership process” that began in 2007 to better leverage the network’s news operations. That effort, he said, would include expanding CNN’s wires team and launching CNN Share, an effort to better aggregate and distribute content within CNN. He also said CNN had struck a deal with Reuters to supplement breaking-news coverage. (CNN and Reuters themselves had parted ways in 2007.)
CNN isn’t the only news organization to break ties with the AP, which has seen strains within its membership over such issues as AP’s digital strategies, local coverage and pricing. Papers in Ohio, Montana and Tennessee have created cooperatives to share stories instead of relying on the AP, for instance. But if you cut off a wire service, you have to replace that content through your own efforts.
Sharing content between publishers or within a far-flung news organization has never been easier. Of course, hyperlinks allow news organizations to leverage the work of other news organizations without a formal agreement, supplementing their own newsgathering efforts. And with content fragmented into single stories that are discovered through search and distributed by readers through e-mail and social media, the lifetime of an exclusive has shrunk dramatically — now often measured in minutes.
But those minutes matter — particularly when news organizations are counting coup.
CORRECTION: A CNN spokesman relayed some incorrect information about the reporting of Steinbrenner’s death, which led to inaccuracies in the original version of this post. An assignment editor confirmed Steinbrenner’s death, not Susan Candiotti. Alina Cho announced his death on-air, not Candiotti. And the statement confirming the death was attributed to Steinbrenner’s family, not Steinbrenner spokesman Howard Rubenstein. All of these errors have been corrected.
