How do wire services work as a business?

[wevets]

I’m wondering about AP, UPI, Reuters, etc.

Don’t they wind up duplicating a lot of the work of other news organizations?

Major newspapers and networks seem to have their own correspondents in place around the world, gathering information and writing stories. What’s to prevent these organizations from banding together and cutting out the wire-service middlemen who seem to do the same thing?
Anyone with knowledge of this business please enlighten me. Thanks!

[friedo]

The New York Times may have a guy dedicated to covering the affairs of the US Department of Agriculture, but the Gobbler’s Knob Pennysaver-Democrat doesn’t. Wire services provide content to huge numbers of smaller newspapers, local television and radio stations, etc. They also break stories often, allowing all their subscribers (such as major newspapers and national news shows) to syndicate the content until they get their own reporters on the scene.

[Squink]

Wikipedia actually has a pretty interesting article covering the rise and fall of UPI.
This bit on the decline covers some of your questions:

AP was a publishers’ cooperative and could assess its members to help pay for extraordinary coverage of such events as wars, the Olympic Games, or national political conventions. UPI clients, in contrast, paid a fixed annual rate; depending on individual contracts, UPI could not always ask them to help shoulder the extraordinary coverage costs. Newspapers typically paid UPI about half what they paid AP in the same cities for the same services: At one point, for example, the Chicago Sun-Times paid AP $12,500 a week, but UPI only $5,000; the Wall Street Journal paid AP $36,000 a week, but UPI only $19,300.

UPI was hurt by changes in the modern news business, including the closing of many of America’s afternoon newspapers, resulting in its customer base shrinking. It went through seven owners between 1992 and 2000, when it was acquired by News World Communications, owner of the Washington Times. Because News World Communications is owned by the Unification Church, this purchase raised concerns about editorial independence. Most notably these concerns were raised by UPI’s best-known reporter, Helen Thomas, who resigned her position as UPI’s chief White House correspondent in May 2000 after 57 years.

Martin Walker, editor of UPI’s English edition—a winner of Britain’s “Reporter of the Year” award when he was Deputy Editor-in-Chief at The Guardian—has said he has experienced “no editorial pressure from the owners.”
…
By 2007, UPI had fewer than 50 employees. In August 2007, the company slashed that number further, and currently has only five reporters, all based in Washington. UPI now concentrates on producing 100-word news summaries rather than producing its own stories.

[Dewey_Finn]

@friedo

The New York Times may have a guy dedicated to covering the affairs of the US Department of Agriculture, but the Gobbler’s Knob Pennysaver-Democrat doesn’t. Wire services provide content to huge numbers of smaller newspapers, local television and radio stations, etc. They also break stories often, allowing all their subscribers (such as major newspapers and national news shows) to syndicate the content until they get their own reporters on the scene.

As you said, the wire services like the AP provide stories written by their own staffers, but they also distribute articles written by the member newspapers. So, using your example of the Gobbler’s Knob Pennysaver-Democrat, assuming that it has a first-hand account of the Groundhog Day ceremony, it might send that story to the AP for use by other newspapers.

[Garfield226]

Others have got it, but just to tie it all together:

A) You pay to be a part of the Associated Press. There’s a subscription fee, with different levels of service. A paper I used to work for paid the fee to get stories, but to get photos and graphics was too expensive, so they did without.

B) You contribute stories to the service. Just because a story says “The Associated Press” under the byline doesn’t mean it was written by an AP correspondent with no other affiliation. Sometimes it was written by someone at another paper, and put out on the wire. The AP actually has desks within some newspapers, specifically to accomplish this task.

So, there’s not much of a risk of papers “banding together to cut out the middleman” because that’s essentially what the AP is anyway. Its Web site says it is a not-for-profit collective owned by its newspaper members.

[anson2995]

AP also provides online content to thousands of online news sources, including sites like Yahoo, ESPN, etc.

To amplify what **Garfield **says, a lot of the stories that move over the AP wire are generated by local reporters. An article written by a Washington Post reporter may appear nationwide with an AP byline.

And as for the health of the AP, pick up any local paper and look at the percentage of content is from the wire and how much is from their own staff.

[Billdo]

@anson2995

To amplify what **Garfield **says, a lot of the stories that move over the AP wire are generated by local reporters. An article written by a Washington Post reporter may appear nationwide with an AP byline.

In addition to the stories generated by local reporters for member papers, the AP also employs its own in-house crew of reporters/reviewers/editors etc. to produce material.