The Associated Press works as a news agency that writes articles not for readers but rather for newspapers. Imagine you're a small town newspaper. You probably have a good enough budget to send a reporter to the capital and cover the governor's speech, but not enough to Washington for Obama's. That's when AP steps in: The small town editor can pay them for snippet about whatever Obama was talking about, tweak it a little to fit their regional interests, and publish it in that morning's paper. You've probably seen them credited before if not in articles than in photographs of important news because they're so widely used.

I've known about this for a long time, but I've never appreciated it more until I started reading lots of different papers. Before if you asked me the most important ones in the country, I would've probably listed The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times. When I tried to peruse them on a daily basis, only half of them were able to provide detailed accounts of important international events. The articles they did produce were impressive and well-researched, but the narrow breadth of topics surprised me.

It all comes down to money. The internet age really did fuck up the news business and I'm worried a bit about our generation because we often receive news through social media, i.e. you're getting your articles from your friends, who probably already agree with your standpoint and have similar interests. What's great about watching the evening news or pulling up a paper during your commute is they have everything that happened right there, whether you care about it or not, and you're forced on some level as your browse headlines to know what's happening. But a lot of us aren't paying a monthly fee for a subscription and are relying on the free articles we're linked to.

In order to provide a certain level of news, you need enough people paying. How much do you think it costs to hire a reporter full-time to run all over Nigeria and see what Boko Haram is doing? Or an entire staff to uncover what's happening in Washington? Or get photographers to risk their lives and take poignant images of the atrocities in Syria? Or have an analyst explain Abeconomics and deflation in Japan? This shit isn't cheap. That's why why 24-hour news channels waste their time reading twitter posts or having a round table discussion of pundits; it's much less expensive than actually going out there and reporting the news. If we want to get good quality information, we're going to have to be willing to pay for it.