An internal memo penned by the Associated Press’ Managing Editor Mike Oreskes was leaked and featured on sites such as The Huffington Post and Gawker this morning. As an effort to keep up with the rapidly increasing news cycle, Oreskes is now offering a new direction for the wire service.

The new plan of action is called “The New Distinctiveness.” But why the change? The AP defines the problem:

“AP wins when news breaks, but after an hour or two we’re often replaced by a piece of content from someone else who has executed something more thoughtful or more innovative. Often it’s someone who has taken what we do (sometimes our reporting itself) and pushed it to the next level of content: journalism that’s more analytical, maybe a fresh and immediate entry point, a move away from text, a multimedia mashup or a different story form that speaks more directly to users.”

To face this challenge, Oreskes will be leading assignment editors and reporters to respond quicker, focus on story themes (dig deeper into the story), diversify communication methods and most important, report with “voice.”

This “reporting with voice” plank of the proposal should set off alarm bells. The full passage states (Emphasis added):

“Journalism With Voice. We’re going to be pushing hard on journalism with voice, with context, with more interpretation. This does not mean that we’re sacrificing any of our deep commitment to unbiased, fair journalism. It does not mean that we’re venturing into opinion, either. It does mean that we need to be looking for ways to be more distinctive and stand out in the field — something our customers need and want. The why and the how of the news are as crucial as the who, what, when and where.”

The use of words like voice, context and interpretation are broad pathways to journalism with a point of view. Ask yourself, how does one report with “voice” while maintaining a “deep commitment to unbiased, fair journalism?” Will the AP weigh the use of “voice” on an ad hoc basis against fair reporting?

The greatest logical stretch in this memo lies with the idea that the Associated Press has always been unbiased up to now. There is a long history of proof otherwise.

Read the full memo:

Colleagues,

Coming out of our strategic process this year, we are committing ourselves to focus on something I want to share with you today — something that has, with changing user behavior online, become crucial to the way we do news and do business.

Let’s start with something that’s obvious but worth laying out plainly: That “next cycle” we speak of so often in The Associated Press is now. Not 12 hours from the first breaking news, not even six hours, but one, maybe two hours from it — and maybe even faster than that.

This is hardly something that we’re just waking up to. But it is accelerating by the week. As we look around the media landscape in recent months, over and over we’re seeing the same thing. AP wins when news breaks, but after an hour or two we’re often replaced by a piece of content from someone else who has executed something more thoughtful or more innovative. Often it’s someone who has taken what we do (sometimes our reporting itself) and pushed it to the next level of content: journalism that’s more analytical, maybe a fresh and immediate entry point, a move away from text, a multimedia mashup or a different story form that speaks more directly to users.

More than ever, we need to infuse that sensibility into our daily process of news and planning. We need to institutionalize it. And we need to do it everywhere in the AP — across geographies, across formats, across subject matter. We can’t let other people win by cannibalizing our content. We need to do it ourselves each day, to parlay our reporting into work with a longer shelf life.

We’re calling this The New Distinctiveness. Here’s an initial and by-no-means complete glimpse into what it means:

Fast Response. The moment news breaks, we’re going to be talking not only about coverage in the moment, but the longer arc. We’re going to be thinking about two hours on, about what we do 12 hours ahead, and even, sometimes, about what we do weeks or months ahead.

Thematic Thinking. We’re going to be much more aggressive in identifying themes off the news — angles the world is thinking about — and digging deeper. Unique and compelling entry points to stories are key here, and those can’t be done on breaking-news autopilot. Many of these new approaches will be infused into the main story on a news event across platforms; that’s as important as creating new stories to stand alone.

Multiple Story Forms. We’re going to be finding unusual ways of telling stories and alternative story forms. We’ve already done this in many ways — photoblogging, data visualization, video (even data visualization in video), text on major events — but it needs to be mainstream and part of our fundamental foundations.

Journalism With Voice. We’re going to be pushing hard on journalism with voice, with context, with more interpretation. This does not mean that we’re sacrificing any of our deep commitment to unbiased, fair journalism. It does not mean that we’re venturing into opinion, either. It does mean that we need to be looking for ways to be more distinctive and stand out in the field — something our customers need and want. The why and the how of the news are as crucial as the who, what, when and where.

Recurring containers. We are going to establish a running “container” that can be used anywhere, tentatively called “:Why it Matters.” It will focus our daily journalism on relevance without sacrificing depth. Other containers will follow. These will be done based on the news and what it needs — they’ll come into existence when they’re useful and not be forced when they’re not.

Rethinking the Planning Process. We are beginning a fundamental rethink of our daily news meetings and planning procedures, one that will increase the substantive discussion and reduce the recitation of story lists. More to come on this soon.

In coming weeks, you’ll see the beginnings of various projects to support this way of thinking. We’re establishing several “test kitchens” in different parts of the News Department to work on this and figure things out. And we’re going to push conversations that focus not only on what the news is and how to get it, but what it MEANS as well. The four test kitchens are Health and Science (led by Kit Frieden and Kevin Roach), Economics and Politics (Hal Ritter and Sally Buzbee), Tourism (Beth Harpaz) and how we work around the clock around the world on big stories (John Mancini and Brian Carovillano).

The test kitchens are a place to try things out and report back to the rest of us. But they aren’t meant to be the only place we are pushing forward. Many of you are already doing this kind of journalism and doing it well across the AP. More than ever before, our reporters and editors are branching out into new ways of thinking and trying new things with customers and audiences in mind. This initiative will be an opportunity to amplify that best work, make it more mainstream and, most importantly, institutionalize it.

Resources, of course, are an issue. And as we lay out our plans to do this, we are mindful of all of the responsibilities that people have. We do not intend this to be yet another thing to add to your already formidable list of things to do. A great deal of this is not mainly about filing more content; it’s about refining our thinking and slightly resequencing our journalistic DNA to understand that sometimes, with good journalism behind it, sharp thinking can differentiate the AP in a very competitive field. (And to reiterate, nothing about this should take our eye off the ball of dominating breaking news. The goal here is to extend our dominance of breaking news by outreporting and outhinking the competition.)

An important note: This isn’t a product. It’s an ever-growing toolbox of approaches to harness our thinking — to make our core news report stronger, more insightful, more appealing and more relevant to the people who buy it and the people who see it. And it’s something you’ll help shape.

We have a group of people from around the AP who will be the steering committee on this, led by myself and Assistant Managing Editor Ted Anthony. And we’ll be elaborating on this in an AP Knows at the beginning of next year. If you have questions, or just want to kick around something you would like to try, get in touch with me or Ted.

This is a key way we can thrive in today’s landscape by using our own news and thinking chops — the smarts we already have — to take things forward. And, not incidentally, it’s going to be a lot of fun,too.

Mike Oreskes

h/t The Huffington Post

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About the author

Logan Churchwell
Logan Churchwell is the AIM Director of Public Relations & Online Development. He previously served in various media relations and public affairs capacities on Capitol Hill and in political campaigns.

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6 Comments for The AP’s “New Distinctiveness” Memo Points to Increased Risk of Bias

bitters

Group think is the problem..and not fleshing out the story..Until they report without bias, they’ll lose the argument…because we can find the rest of the story somewhere else on the internet..and we’ll remember they didn’t provide it.

teapartydoc

The memo is a statement of an institution in decline. The theme of it is a plea for relevance that it is incapable of attaining in a world that is hungry more for information than it is hungry for guidance. The leadership at the AP, seeing this decline with much more clarity than those they lead, are also more aware of the desperate nature of their situation. They know that they cannot provide any more information to this information-hungry world than they are doing at present, and rather than invest in resources that can provide a means of satisfying this demand, they grasp at the straws of The aforementioned talisman of relevance.