The Associated Press, one of the world’s oldest and most influential news agencies, announced on Monday, April 6, that it is offering an unspecified number of its US-based journalists voluntary buyout packages. The organization, which has sustained itself on
newspaper-centred journalism since the mid-nineteenth century, is now accelerating its departure from that model. The News Media Guild, the union representing AP journalists, said more than 120 of its members received these voluntary separation offers on Monday alone.
Newspaper companies, once the backbone of AP’s revenue, now account for just ten percent of its total income — a dramatic fall from grace. Over the past four years, revenue from newspapers has dropped by twenty-five percent. In 2024, two of the country’s largest newspaper publishers, Gannett and McClatchy, cut ties with AP entirely. More recently, Lee
Enterprises — publisher of several major regional papers — has signalled it wants to exit its contract before it expires at the end of 2026.
AP’s executive editor Julie Pace has been refreshingly direct about the organization’s direction. “We are not a newspaper company and haven’t been for quite some time,” she said. The agency is now firmly focused on visual journalism and forging new revenue streams, particularly through partnerships with technology companies investing in artificial
intelligence. Since 2022, the number of video journalists employed in the United States has doubled, and dedicated rapid-response teams have been assembled to cover the day’s biggest stories regardless of where staff are based geographically.
The bet on technology is already paying dividends. Revenue from tech companies has grown by two hundred percent over the last four years. In 2023, AP became one of the first news organizations to strike a deal with an AI company, agreeing to lease a portion of its text archive to OpenAI. Google followed last year, contracting with AP to deliver news through its Gemini chatbot — the tech giant’s first such deal with any news publisher. As AP’s senior vice president Kristin Heitmann put it, “If you can think of a large technology company, they are a customer of ours.”
Not everyone inside the organization is celebrating the transformation. The journalists’ union is openly frustrated, arguing that AP’s hundreds of skilled and experienced reporters are fully capable of adapting to the changing media landscape — if only the company would invest in proper training and tools. Instead, the union says, AP is pushing out seasoned staff while cozying up to artificial intelligence. The union also revealed that it requested talks last week over the use of AI in the newsroom, a request the organization ignored.
Pace, however, insists the changes come from a position of strength, not desperation. “The AP is not in trouble,” she said, adding that the global workforce reduction target remains below five percent and that AP remains committed to maintaining a presence in all fifty states. In an era overflowing with misinformation, she argued, the values of fast, accurate and unbiased journalism matter more than ever — and those values, she believes, are precisely what will carry AP into its next chapter.
