AP moves to replace journalists with “visual” reporting. Why?
The five W’s in journalism every student learns on day one are “Who, what, when, where and why”?
This week, Associated Press, founded in 1846 and winner of 59 Pulitzer’s announced that they are buying out U.S. print journalists and either not replacing them or replacing them with video-journalists or “Visual reporting” in corporate speak.
I have been a photojournalist in my career and also a writer. My photojournalism was pretty good I would say, but it never broached the subject of why. It was always about Who, What, Where, maybe sometimes How. But rarely why. I was paid to get the image and document what it was about. There are exceptions of course to this, but they are not the norm.
What is happening?
Due to the continued drop in usage of AP stories by it’s member news agencies, and a shift to more photo and video based news, AP has decided to shift away from their traditional print media journalists. While the company’s leaders claim they are doing this from a position of “strength” and that they have no intention of abandoning their core mission of providing factual impartial news, the question that needs to be asked is:
What is the outcome of such a change?
In journalism school the first thing you are taught is to ask the five W’s, which frame all stories” Who did it? What is it? When did it happen? Where did it happen? And finally, perhaps the most important question of all, “Why did it happen?”
As we move more and more into a video dominated world, the details of why things happen become more opaque. The complexities of why are many, often not initially stated or purposely hidden (why did we go to war against Iran? The President’s reasons change day to day, sometime hour to hour).
Why is “Why” so important?
The core of any story is why. Why was someone murdered, or we passed a law or any other news piece you can name. Without the why we are left clueless, to choose our own why’s that may be totally wrong. Think about Robert Kennedy Jr and his vaccine attacks. Why is he doing this? Why are vaccines important? The answers to these questions inform people, rather than simply are the next headline or video tag in a rolling feed on Instagram, never to return again. The decisions made by uninformed people, simply watching video feeds with little or no context, can range from January 6th insurrection, to allowing their children to die from measles because they don’t understand the why of vaccines.
When we drop the why’s we drop the meaning of news. Add to that, that Ai gets its understanding of news from sources like AP. Without that underlying meaning, the answers we get as time goes on from Ai will get even worse than they are today.
While we still have places like the New York Times and Substack to find out the why’s, the shrinking nature of the news world, and the constant attacks by wanna be dictators like Trump put all of us at risk.
This is not a bit of news we should cheer. We should start looking harder for the missing why.
The original story was created by AP (I could not find it on their website) but covered by the Seattle Times here. Please subscribe to The Seattle Times or your local news outlet of choice.
Read more on the history of the AP here.
SWThanks so much for the thought -provoking piece. I have moved from PT to Portland Oregon but now cherish my subscription to the NY times even as I miss the Seattle Times. NOTHING can replace the in depth reporting we receive from our newspapers.