AP has played into that problem as well by turning its news copy into a more writer-driven operation. For years, the AP was like the New York Times, in that neither was seen was “writer friendly”. The copy was dull, with any truly descriptive adjectives being wiped out by the copy editor’s pencil, and it the reporters were mostly liberal, it was a kind of bureaucratic G-11 civil servant liberalism that tilted to one side ever so gently, to avoid the folks at Rockefeller Center getting calls from too many of their members about editorializing in news stories (and yes, having an alternate news service like UP or INS around in the past also helped in keeping the editors and the AP execs on the straight and narrow).
The Times went away from that ideal about 25 years ago, and within the last decade, the AP has followed, in an effort to make their stories more “interesting” and “readable”. And they can do it easier today because their income stream has been moving away from the member papers that made up their base for years and towards electronic media, either TV or via the Internet. And the copy probably is livelier, but by allowing the reporters more freedom to better express their own opinions within standard news stories (as opposed to the opinions of the people they’re actually reporting on), the AP is doing the same thing bigger papers like the NYT, Washington Post or L.A. Times are doing, which is to turn off about 50 percent of their potential readers.
Returning to the AP Stylebook circa 1961 probably isn’t the way to go, since reading news has to compete with so many more diversions today for people’s attention. But the editors at the AP could do their member papers a big service if they’s start being more selective about what adjectives and whose opinions get into the copy that’s not labeled as “news analysis”.
