The news agency “Associated Press” has decided to axe 10 percent of its workforce by some point in 2009, mostly through attrition, AP president and chief executive Tom Curley said on Thursday (November 20). The staff reduction will amount to a loss of more than 400 positions from a global staff of 4,100, and Curley said that the cuts will include some of the news cooperative's 3,000 journalists. On being asked if the cuts would include newsroom jobs, Curley noted that 75 percent of the staff are journalists.

In a statement released by the company said that the Associated Press, like virtually every business in the world, was defining strategies for operating in these complex and difficult financial times.
The AP is still profitable, but cash flow is expected to decline from $95 million this year to $66 million in 2009. The cooperative also faces rising competition, including from Time Warner Inc.'s CNN unit, which is forming a wire service it intends to market to newspapers.

More than 100 AP member newspapers also have threatened to quit the service, including the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch and the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, Minn.

The cooperative intends to shift 91 editor positions from its New York headquarters and U.S. bureaus to the new centers through 2009. About 1,300 of them are full members and more than 4,000 are associate members — generally weekly newspapers and broadcasters.

AP is one of the world's three major news agencies, along with Agence France-Presse and Reuters. The company was founded in 1846. Today, it serves about 1,500 newspapers and 5,000 radio and television station members in the United States.