AP and Asap

The abandonment of the AP's youth-targeted news product Asap tells us far too much about the future of what we're still calling news. Launched in 2005 Asap was intended to bring the news to younger people - the same younger people who wouldn't accept a subscription to their local paper even if it was free because they didn't want back issues piling up in their houses.

For news consumers, news fulfils a number of discrete functions that traditionally happen to be packaged up as a newspaper or broadcast. One is informative: to find out what has happened in the world since e.g. yesterday (which can normally be summarised in a few lines and read in seconds). One is social: to pick up relevant conversation points (a function of news that incidentally becomes decreasingly powerful as fewer people consume news). And one is entertainment (or distraction, perhaps humanity's "primary discretionary need" in an era of abundance): commuter newspapers fill a commute, weekend newspapers help one more pleasantly idle away a Sunday morning.

Reaching out to younger potential news consumers with a slight recut of the traditional news package, when they have already successfully and unilaterally depackaged the functions of news from traditional delivery platforms, unsurprisingly failed. AS Steve Yelvington says, RIP Asap.