A year in the life of a New Yorker

Wednesday I marked one year of living in the city.

John and I celebrated my dad's birthday last May 8, then the next morning we headed to the airport to spend a week looking at apartments together. Surely, I deludedly thought, we'd find something that week, then we could just enjoy a little vacation time and celebrate our wedding anniversary in our adopted hometown before John headed home to tend to our house.

That seems like such a long time ago. Before I'd seen a gazillion apartments or begged Nick to show us this place, before I'd had my first day at the AP.

Here, for contrast, is us last May 9 waiting for our morning flight at Detroit Metro:










And here's us this May 9, hanging out on the patio at Tavern on the Green, about a block from our apartment, with our neighbor, Kristi.



















Helping to re-invent the AP

I've mentioned to a few of you in recent weeks that I was working hard on a high-profile project that I couldn't really talk about yet.

AP's CEO introduced it to our members at our annual meeting Monday -- a new way of offering our services:
http://www.ap.org/pages/about/pressreleases/pr_050707b.html
http://www.ap.org/pages/about/pressreleases/wn_050707b.html

Few people outside the industry seem to understand how AP operates, but at a very simple level, we sell services to newspapers, which use them to produce their news reports. They can choose from several kinds of sports content, different flavors of elections coverage, bigger and smaller packages of business news, etc. We literally offer hundreds of different services, each with its own rate structure.

Here's the nugget about what I've been part of:
As newspapers focus increasingly on locally relevant news, Curley said the AP is proposing changes that would allow members to subscribe to a core package of breaking news and then add other news packages. Currently, it offers broader packages of news defined mainly by the volume of news delivered -- small, medium or large.

Under the proposed restructuring that would take effect in 2009, members would have access to a core breaking news service that would include, for example, news from a neighboring state that might not otherwise be available. Members also would be able to add extra content such as analytical stories and premium tiers of news in categories such as sports, lifestyle, business and entertainment.

The new system would allow news organizations to make individual purchases of stories and photos as needed, something that's not currently offered. Curley noted in his speech that some members do not want to pay for certain kinds of AP news content that they don't use.

It's probably too inside baseball to even make sense if you aren't a newspaper publisher, but the bottom line is that I'm really excited to be on a project that fundamentally looks at how we sell our services and how we serve our members.