NEW YORK (AP) — The Associated Press says it is setting up a sister organization that will seek to raise money in support of state and local news reporting, as the crisis in that sector shows little sign of abating.
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AP in particular can play an important role in bolstering coverage of government and political news in the states, said Tim Franklin, who leads the local news initiative at Northwestern’s Medill journalism school. The Pew Research Center has detailed that there are fewer full-time reporters working in statehouses than there were a decade ago.
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Besides philanthropy, the AP has been more aggressively marketing its own news website and asking for reader donations. “We believe there is a gap in the U.S. market, in the consumer arena, for people who want independent, fact-based, non-partisan news, and that’s the role that the AP plays in the ecosystem,” Veerasingham said.
It’s crazy that the town she lives in, which is bigger than ours, has no outlet at all for this stuff. The only TV station is a local PBS station that just plays through storms without interruption (same with the NPR station, they were playing classical music while trees were being uprooted by the 80 mph+ winds.
We have two local TV stations and a local newspaper. They weren’t as informative as they certainly could have been, but I looked at the media outlets in her town the day after the storm and there was nothing.