Minneapolis Star-Tribune gives notice to AP

Two years notice. That's how long the AP requires papers to give to ditch its increasingly crappy product.

The Star Tribune of Minneapolis has become the latest, and so far the largest, daily newspaper to inform the Associated Press that it plans to drop the service in two years.

MinnPost.com reports that the paper informed AP that it will no longer use the service as of the fall of 2010. AP requires that member newspapers give two years' notice before dropping the service [...]

The Star Tribune joins a string of other daily papers who have either given notice or revealed plans to cut the service in recent months. Those include The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Wash.; The Post Register of Idaho Falls; The Bakersfield Californian; and The Yakima Herald-Republic and Wenatchee World, both in Washington.

Keith Olbermann, chatting here yesterday, noted that the AP's model is dying.

This is an outmoded business model, and I speak as somebody who broke in at what used to be the other half of the AP duopoly, United Press International. When we lost our fifth or sixth best writer to a newspaper in Asbury Park, NJ (nothing against the town or the paper), I told my boss there wouldn't be a UPI in ten years. He was genuinely taken aback. This was in 1980.

The hardware - the ticker machines - made the AP viable. Only they had invested in the infrastructure. You and I now, with the internet, have infrastructure virtually equivalent to the AP.

Wait them out. They do not have long to live.