On Wednesday, November 2, Stevens hosted alumnus Michael Fabiano, Head of the Americas Business at The Associated Press (AP), for a lecture titled “Breaking Barriers: How Innovation Is Changing the News Industry.” While I wasn’t able to attend the live lecture, I was able to watch a recording of the lecture and wanted to share my thoughts on some of the ideas and sentiments presented by Fabiano and my main takeaways.
Fabiano began his lecture by giving a broad overview of what kind of company AP is, more information about its operations, and how the company has grown from its inception. One main theme throughout this introduction to the company was the innovation through the intersection of engineering and journalism and how the collaboration of these stark fields allowed the company to technologically advance and deliver news to a fast-growing audience. What struck me from this initial presentation were the many similarities between AP and The Stute. Firstly, The Stute was established only 40 years after AP, subjecting both organizations to growth generated by the advent of quickly developing technology and the “computer age.” Additionally, it seems that both The Stute and AP require engineering disciplines and journalism enthusiasts to function. While these similarities may seem somewhat far-fetched and trivial, it’s interesting to see how a multimillion-dollar news company and a university newspaper organization can relate to each other.
Contrastingly (and quite obviously), The Stute shares a multitude of differences with AP. The most interesting one, in my opinion, is how each organization views itself. The Stute’s main goal is to report and record Stevens’ history and uplift student opinions. We use technology as an asset to bolster our presence on campus and on social media while keeping our main focus on the news. On the flip side, as Fabiano states, AP has increasingly begun to view itself as a software company. This newfound title is appropriate considering how deeply their operations are integrated into technology from storing content to licensing content to optimizing the user experience. While AP is a news organization at heart, there’s a lot of focus that goes into the technology side of the company. In fact, most news organizations these days are so deeply rooted in technology innovation that the lines between classifying them as a news company or a tech company become blurred.
As sad as it is to say, the news printing industry is a dying one. I grew up seeing newspapers flooding libraries, schools, shopping centers, office buildings, and everywhere in between; now all I see are rare sightings of the Wall Street Journal apart from the abundance of Stutes across campus. While the joy of reading news from large broadsheets is incomparable to scrolling through the blue light on a smartphone, even I can admit that digital news is faster and easier to consume.
Currently at The Stute, we deliver our news every Friday, in print and online. This means that something that happens after Wednesday does not get reported on until the following week’s Friday. With limited resources and staff members, it’s often not possible for us to report on “breaking news” as soon as we’d like.
With the increasing need of delivering news faster, I wonder, will The Stute ever jump on the trend of becoming a software organization? Change is already in store as we are currently looking into engaging a team of student developers to design an app, and this will definitely be a multi-semester project. An app would allow us to reach wider audiences and deliver quick alerts about breaking news on campus. Could this possibly be the future of The Stute?
I do hope that The Stute never stops printing papers. In fact, I keep having this recurring dream of myself walking onto campus 70 years into the future and picking up a copy of a completely redesigned Stute (and might I add, I look pretty good for a 90 year old). But I am curious to see how The Stute technologically advances within the next few decades.
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