Mears' musings on the AP

Walter Mears comes from an indispensable yet under appreciated staple in the news industry: The Associated Press, simply referred to as the AP. My understanding of the AP was limited; I thought of it as the all knowing,trusted and independent entity that provided of the basis of many stories. Although I had been exposed to it for the greater part of my academic career as a journalism student, I never had an understanding of its origins, and its position in the world of news.

Mears, the most seasoned guest speaker my critical writing class has had thus far, has covered 11 presidential candidates, and been doing political reporting for more than half a century, to put things in perspective. According to Mears, the Associate Press dates back much further. Created around 1848, the AP was established by a few newspapers in the civil war era. He is a strong proponent from the old school paradigm of journalism.

" What is news? The closest I could come up with is a disciplined explanation, boiled down to fact, stripped from clutter," he said.

When Mears became a reporter for them in 1955, he along with his reporting peers created the news. They provided a uniform voice as well as a high standard in journalism. Only ten years later, the news fragmented somewhat when broadcast news presented itself into the picture.

"We had to change the way we looked at reporting...we no longer were always the first to give people the news," Mears said.

Decades later, media continues to divide and multiply like splitting amoebas. With the internet, multiple cable networks, blogs and other diverse news sources competing to tell the same stories, this forced the AP to challenge themselves and find an appealing and different way of reporting. At the same time, shifts in the digital information age and shrinking budgets of news organizations made it hard for them to support the AP, despite the fact that they created it.

But the fact that most papers cut down lots of international coverage means that they need the AP to do what they can't afford to do.
"The AP’s presence in bureaus overseas have become the real time eyes and ears of the news media." Mears said.
Evolving alongside the digital revolution, the AP found different ways to charge companies on the internet and otherwise as a news cooperative for their services.

When Mears was once told that he could be replaced by four reporters, he retorted, "but can those reporters make up more than half of the news paper content? "
And the answer is, of course not.
However, the AP did cut back it rates by 10 percent, in response to the dwindling finances of many news organizations.

Its likely that the balancing act on this teetering scale will continue to be a little shaky until the older forms of media figure out how to be relevant in the digital age.

However the cards may fall, Mears is confident that there will always be a need for the AP to fill in the blanks.
He believes that if a society loses true reporting, "it loses its democracy."