The Associated Press offered buyouts to more than 120 staffers in its union on Monday, mostly on its U.S. news team, as it pivots toward digital and visual-led journalism focused more on national stories.
Axios first reported the buyouts. The news organization will also seek buyout volunteers from other U.S. reporting teams, according to a note executive editor Julie Pace sent to staff on Monday. The decision will largely affect staffers who help distribute AP stories to U.S. newspaper groups, and the cuts will impact less than 5% of the AP’s global news headcount.
Pace told staff in the note that the AP will be “focused on digital-first, visually led journalism.” The organization has doubled its number of U.S. video journalists since 2022 and will embrace a model focused on rapid response-style reporting and beat reporting, Pace wrote.
“Change isn’t easy – I recognize that,” she wrote. “At the same time, all organizations, including ours, must make choices about what is core to their future. AP’s future is rooted in its breadth of coverage, and we must be nimble, strategic and efficient in how we produce that journalism.”
The AP News Guild said in a statement on Monday the organization’s journalists are “willing and able to adjust to the changing media landscape.”
“However, the company refuses to offer them appropriate training and tools,” the statement read. “Instead, AP continues to get rid of experienced staff and flirt with artificial intelligence — ignoring the opportunity to differentiate AP news stories as ones that are and always will be created by human journalists.”
An AP spokesperson told TheWrap the organization is profitable and that the changes were the best way to serve its top customers, including broadcasters and digital outlets, along with tech companies. Pace told staffers that the majority of the AP’s revenue comes from those sectors, while the division tied to newspaper groups made up less than 10% of its business.
USA TODAY Co. (formerly Gannett) and McClatchy, two companies that own local newspapers across several U.S. markets, said in 2024 they would stop licensing AP content due to costs. The AP has struck content licensing deals with OpenAI and Google to help boost their respective AI models, ChatGPT and Gemini, and it licensed its election data to the prediction market Kalshi last month.
The news wire will continue to produce local and state news through its nonprofit AP Fund for Journalism, which Pace wrote aimed to have 150 participating newsrooms by the end of 2026. It would also keep reporters in all 50 states.
“As a 180-year-old news organization, we have evolved countless times. It’s how we’ve made ourselves indispensable for nearly two centuries,” Pace wrote. “This is about the next phase of evolution.”
