The AP's Battle For Relevance In A Decentralized Universe
By Jason Lee Miller

What’s the biggest threat to a centralized organization? Decentralization, of course. Like antimatter to the AP’s matter, the populous Web built a new publishing reality Old Media would rather not face: they’ve lost control of the news.

For over a century, the Associated Press has controlled the news in text form. But this century brings the AP a larger threat than it has ever faced: the decentralization of news dissemination and the removal of news publication cost barriers due to the Internet.

The Associated Press, so the narrative of its origin goes, was born of inglorious necessity. Competing journalists in rowboats braved the rough waters of New York Harbor, and precariously clamored aboard immigrant ships for news from Europe. Enough of them drowned that those surviving thought it best to centralize the process and form a union for news distribution. In that sense, it was designed to be anticompetitive from its very start: one collaborative organization distributing news for all.

And the AP would like to keep it that way.

Slate.com’s Jack Shafer points us to an article, ironically found via Google Book Search, written in 1918 by legendary journalist Oswald Garrison Villard for The Atlantic.

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