News media chains Gannett and McClatchy ditched the Associated Press this week, bringing legacy media formerly known as newspapers several giant leaps closer to their awaiting grave.

Gannett owns 200 newspapers nationwide, including the Ames Tribune, Boone News-Republican, Des Moines Register, and Iowa City Press-Citizen.

The AP is the world’s largest newsgathering operation with bureaus across the globe.

A Gannett executive, Kristin Roberts, snidely remarked Gannett news organizations “create more journalism every day than the AP.”

That depends on what you call journalism.

The “12 biggest restaurants opening this spring” doesn’t meet my standard, nor does the burning question of “What’s the best beer in Iowa?”

What about this mild curiosity: “How far is the new Mattel Adventure Park from Des Moines?”

I’ll save you the click. It’s in suburban Kansas City on the Kansas side. Plan your trips accordingly.

These are all headlines from the Gannett outlet store in Des Moines.

Regular readers of these paragraph stacks know I spent most of my newspaper years working for the Register and that Gannett laid me off in 2020, effectively ending my career in the trade and as someone who made a living writing.

I don’t want to trash the Register. I have a few friends left on the staff. They’re doing their best, but even when I still worked there four years ago, daily journalism felt like trying to serve a meal during the final hours of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

I hate that Gannett and McClatchy are abandoning the AP, but I don’t blame them. What are they supposed to do when everyone wants their content for free and the only content they want has nothing to do with what the AP covers most days?

The AP covers state, national, and international affairs with wisdom, skill, and fearlessness. If it’s happening in America, there’s an AP reporter and probably a photographer nearby.

The AP is so respected that the communist government in Vietnam let the news agency keep working unfettered after Saigon fell in 1975.

The AP is seldom lyrical or cute. They tell you facts and arrange them carefully for maximum understanding. AP reporters and photographers are mostly anonymous under their eponymous byline. The AP isn’t here to entertain you, although their “Oddities” stories often are entertaining. The AP exists to inform.

Most print newspapers that aren’t strongly entrenched in a small community are focused on their digital audience. The digital audience wants to be angry or terrified.

The most depressing moment in my journalism career came when we started to get the data on the online audience.

We had hard numbers that told us what people read, how long they read it, and how often they shared it on social media.

The data show online readers cared mostly about five things: sports, presidential politics (not Congress, the state, or local government), salacious crime – especially if it involved a white woman, and snooty beer at overpriced restaurants.

Stories about schools, city councils, boards of supervisors, and other institutions critical to the functioning of everyday life and our communities were ignored by audiences.

At the same time, Gannett assigned reporters page view goals. Poor slobs working beats like education started churning out stories about teachers in trouble rather than more substantive and long-ranging problems and innovations in schools.

A story about a teacher having a sexual relationship with a student will get more page views than a story about renewing the physical plant and equipment levy every time.

Training instructed reporters and editors to use tricky headlines. I sat in one session in which the trainer told a room full of reporters that if the third-string quarterback for the Hawkeyes got injured, we shouldn’t put the fact that the QB was a backup in the headline. Instead, we should say, “Which Iowa QB is hurt this week?”

Bait the clicks. That was the goal. It still is. They’ll say it isn’t but look at the headlines at the beginning of this column. They’re either lists or questions. They don’t give you a whiff of news.

Who’s to blame here? We are. We are the dummies who want to stay dumb. We hate critical thinking as a nation.

Our nation is willfully ignorant of global affairs. This ignorance is proportional to the nation’s ignorance of its history.

We are drowning in confirmation bias and overwhelmed by compulsive outrage disorder. We are allergic to critical thinking, so much so that the Iowa Legislature has concentrated on doing away with critical thinking in our schools.

Why would anyone pay for the Associated Press? They are no-nonsense.

America is only interested in nonsense.

Journalism isn’t dead. It’s an undead zombie lumbering the fields mumbling “brains.”

Alas, most of the audience doesn’t have any.

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