asap killed asap

 The Associated Press’ youth-y multimedia wire, “asap” is getting killed off by October.

I’ve written 3 drafts of this post and I’m still not happy with any of them.

Each had the same theme–I’m pretty disappointed asap is getting the axe so young, without much restructuring, revamping or experimentation beyond it’s original format. And it’s not because I whole heartedly endorsed everything asap did–I definitely read some of the articles and cringed. But part of it was an experiment because everyone knows, the kids just aren’t reading traditional media at a rate that will replace their dying parents and grandparents.

Squaredster might have said it best:

“asap did video. It did blogs. It did some good content that was of interest to the demo. It wasn’t entirely like Lawrence Welk at a rap concert, to borrow a line from Jon Katz. But I can’t imagine anyone was able to make a go of a new print section (one of the touted beauties of the initiative) based on it. Or saw traction on a standalone site or section hanging off  a newspaper.com. It wound up helping to change AP’s content-gathering culture a little bit, I’d guess. Good! And now will live on in providing at least some content that moves the basic AP stream a few millimeters closer to relevance to a younger audience.”

I hope and assume the AP will fold in some of the alternative story forms that asap used into their outfit, as well as diverse voices and tone of their content. And I really hope we figure out a way to get youth interested in news and that we realize some of this research, testing and development takes time.  … Something that we don’t have much of, unfortunately.

Full Disclosure: A friend of mine, Hillary Rhodes, is a writer for asap and was also the original editor for Your Mom, another innovative youth project that ended up dying earlier than it should have. Hillary was part of the group at Medill (with me) that researched, prototyped, designed and proposed the youth site/product to Lee Enterprises and the Quad City Times.