Associated Press leadership said Monday it is offering buyouts to an unspecified number of its U.S.-based journalists as part of a faster transition away from a newspaper-heavy model of news gathering and distribution. The plan arrives amid long-running industry layoffs and cost pressures, and AP executives tied the move to changes they say are required for how audiences and business customers now consume news.
Julie Pace, AP executive editor and senior vice president, told the Associated Press that the organization is shifting more quickly because it wants to be “bolder in this transformation,” while continuing coverage across the U.S. The AP said it is also reorienting investment toward more video work and new revenue streams tied to technology and data licensing, including partnerships and services that were described as compensating for the decline of traditional newspaper income.
Pace said the AP’s goal is to reduce its global staffing by less than 5%, but she also acknowledged that buyouts are being offered only to U.S. journalists. She said the final scope would depend on how many of those employees accept the offer, leaving the total number of jobs affected in the U.S. unclear. The AP did not say how many journalists it employs, though it maintains reporting teams with an international footprint as well as U.S. staff.
The News Media Guild, which represents AP journalists, said more than 120 of the staff members it represents received buyout offers on Monday. In a statement, the union said the AP refused to offer “appropriate training and tools” and accused the company of “flirt[ing] with artificial intelligence” rather than differentiating AP stories as ones “that are and always will be created by human journalists.” The union also said AP ignored its request last week to bargain over artificial intelligence.
AP said the buyout plan reflects changes that are already underway inside the newsroom. Pace said the AP has doubled the number of video journalists it employs in the United States since 2022 and described additional staffing moves such as rapid-response teams that contribute to major stories regardless of geography. She said the AP is also putting more journalists on beats designed to break news on topics where customers have known interest, while still maintaining a presence in all 50 states.
The company’s revenue backdrop includes a continuing decline from newspaper customers. AP said revenue from newspapers has dropped by 25% over the past four years, and it noted that Gannett and McClatchy, two large traditional newspaper publishers, dropped the AP in 2024. Pace said the company learned that Lee Enterprises—whose papers include The Buffalo News, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Richmond Times-Dispatch—was seeking an early exit from a contract due to expire at the end of 2026, but she said AP had already decided earlier this year that it needed to accelerate its transformation.
AP executives also described growth coming from technology and data products aimed at enterprises. Kristin Heitmann, AP chief revenue officer, said the AP has seen 200% growth in revenue from technology companies over the past four years, and she said that if “you can think of a large technology company,” it is a customer of the AP. The company said it struck early partnerships for artificial intelligence and data licensing, including in 2023 leasing part of its text archive to OpenAI as OpenAI built out its capabilities and launching on Snowflake Marketplace last year to license data to enterprises.
AP said it has also worked with Google, including a deal announced last year to provide news through the Gemini chatbot. Heitmann said those arrangements are part of how AP is pursuing new revenue sources while continuing to deliver what it described as fast, accurate, non-biased news. The AP also said it agreed last month to sell U.S. elections data to Kalshi, and it said its elections products have been a growth area, including a 30% increase in customers between the 2020 and 2024 election cycles.
Pace said the AP’s leaders view the transition to new formats and business models as connected to staying faithful to AP’s editorial values. She said the changes make it more important that AP retain its standards as it moves forward, and she said the organization has been testing new forms of fact-checking, including using video, as well as more often putting journalists in public to explain how they produced particular stories. In one remark about public credibility, Pace said: “I think that authenticity, and the fact that you can associate a real person who is often quite experienced and quite deep on their beats … it builds more credibility.”