Dow Jones & Co, recently bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, is ending an agreement of more than 40 years to carry news from the Associated Press after the AP said it wanted more money. ( Reuters )
Instead, Dow Jones Newswires will run news from Agence France-Presse, a French news service.
The AP and Dow Jones failed to agree on a price after more than a year of negotiations, AP Chief Revenue Officer Tom Brettingen said on Tuesday.
"We did not believe we were being adequately compensated for the use of our content on DJ Newswires," Brettingen said in a statement. "We weren't able to resolve that with DJ, so we're going our separate ways."
Dow Jones, which Murdoch's News Corp bought for $5.6 billion three months ago, said Dow Jones Newswires would distribute general and political news from Paris-based Agence France-Presse and that it would expand editorial staff.
The AP and Dow Jones started talking about their arrangement more than a year ago, before Murdoch said that he wanted to buy Dow Jones, Brettingen said in an interview.
Brettingen and Dow Jones declined to say how much Dow Jones paid the AP and how much more the AP was seeking.
The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones's flagship newspaper, still will run AP stories, as will the Factiva online news archive, which Dow Jones also owns.
The company said the moves were "part of Dow Jones's broader strategy to invest in its global financial news operations."
An internal Dow Jones memo to staff obtained by Reuters said that negotiations with the AP were unsuccessful and that AP had decided to end the deal, which has included sharing offices and close integration.
Dow Jones will begin shuffling employees out of bureaus where it shares space with the AP, Brettingen said. He said he did not know the total number of employees affected.
"We will work with AP to ensure orderly transitions of our staff out of AP offices, and off the AP network and payroll," Neal Lipschutz, senior vice president and managing editor, said in the Dow Jones memo.
The AP, which is based in New York, is a cooperative that is owned by its 1,500 daily-newspaper members. The AP in recent months has been reorganizing its bureaus and undergoing other changes as it expands internationally and seeks new revenue sources beyond its traditional base.
Many of its member newspapers, meanwhile, are suffering from a steady fall in advertising revenue.
Dow Jones Newswires competes with Reuters Group PLC in delivering financial news. London-based Reuters, which is being acquired by Canadian electronic publisher Thomson Corp in a deal scheduled to be completed on April 17, provides financial, general and political news from around the world.
The AP has had a deal with Dow Jones since 1967, an AP spokesman said.