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Comment by jethro_tell | Hacker News Reader

Back when we had small town journalism, you'd get AP or Reuters as a service to be your world/national news department. The service was that they would give you a whole news department and you could copy paste the article and have your tiny news room writing about the basketball win and the bake sale.

That was the deal, but it's a subscription service for one. Secondly, the AP or Reuters got the by line in your paper. Third, you don't change the article in any way. You don't use a piece of it, and ad you own comments. you paste the article on the page with an appropriate byline

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> Third, you don't change the article in any way. You don't use a piece of it, and ad you own comments. you paste the article on the page with an appropriate byline

This has never been how AP works. Where are you even getting this stuff?

AP traditionally provides stories in an "inverted pyramid" [0] structure, such that an outlet can use as much or as little of the story as they need to fill a given space on the page.

They're free to modify the text as much as they want to. Such an article will list the Associated Press and whatever journalists edited, contributed, or otherwise mangled the original article. My (least) favorite modern example of this is when the Fox News website takes an AP article that makes the Republican party look bad and adds or subtracts to it until it's less damaging. The people responsible for that mangling are listed as contributors to such an article, as is the AP.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)

I think it's fairly common to take a wire article and change/update it with original reporting.

For example, the current main article on The Guardian's website is:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/13/taliban-seize-...

which has a byline of:

"Luke Harding and agencies"

Oh, Luke Harding.

His journalistic ethics are very much open to question. This is the guy that published a book containing the secret password to Assange's encrypted document dump. While he was supposedly cooperating with Assange on behalf of the Guardian.

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