Friday is a big day for the media, as we’ve promised to finally showcase the picture of our dog with a mohawk. Kidding! It’s the Royal Wedding, and whether or not the United States people care about it doesn’t matter, the media is going to cover the hell out of it. Even New York TV stations are getting in on it.

Romenesko got a look at how the Associated Press is going to cover the wedding, and though the memo begins “Friday is royal wedding day in London and our report will look a little different,” the coverage actually begins tomorrow, and from then on out it is Royal Wedding 24/7 for the AP:

As Prince William and Kate Middleton say their vows, The Associated Press will be alerting every development, running live video in SD and HD, tweeting and posting on Facebook, updating a multifaceted interactive, sending four radio packages an hour and filing hundreds of photographs from key vantage points.

If you’re not interested in that, we promise our dog does look ridiculous. Dogs are animals! They’re not supposed to have haircuts!

Much speculation has been given to the fact that no news organization won the “Breaking News” Pulitzer prize this year, particularly because Pulitzer administrator Sig Gissler indicated that there was no winner because none of the entries were good enough.

Some agreed with him that breaking news is now a lost art. Other felt that Twitter really deserved the prize, if that was possible. Larry Kramer wrote that “if the newspaper industry gives up on breaking news, they should just close their doors.”

Now Joel Achenbach argues at The Washington Post that it’s not the fault of the news organizations that no one won, but of the Pulitzer Prize’s own flawed rule system. Both the Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal can claim they were robbed of the breaking news Pulitzer, because both did “tremendous work on the gulf oil spill, which was the biggest breaking news story of the year.” Writes Achenbach:

Now, you might argue that the spill was not truly “breaking” news, except for the first couple of days. You would be mistaken. It was ALL breaking, for three months, every day different from the last.

So why didn’t they win? Achenbach suggests it’s time for a rule change.

I suspect the real problem is that the breaking news category stipulates that the work be “local.” Why make that stipulation? There’s already a separate category for Local News.

The News Guild and the Associated Press have reached an agreement – albeit a tentative one – that increases pay, but does not stop layoffs for AP staffers. Pro: More money! Con: Might not be there to get that money.

According to Poynter, union President Tony Winton released a memo explaining the 33 month long deal, explaining, “The bargaining committee believes this is the best deal possible short of more intense mobilization activities, up to and including a strike.”

As part of the deal, there will be three 1.5 percent salary raises, and while AP workers cannot be let go for freelancers, they can be laid off. There are also changes to vacation, retirement funds and other items.

UPDATE:
Here’s the AP’s statement on the contract, from Jessica Bruce, Vice President, Human Resources:

“These were very difficult talks, covering difficult topics in uncertain economic times. With this agreement now in place, AP and its staff can now focus their attention and energy on the initiatives critical to driving revenue so that AP can stay competitive and maintain its leadership in the media marketplace.”

Amanda Barrett has been named the Associated Press New York City news editor.  Barrett joined the AP in 2007 as content coordinator for multimedia.

The appointment was announced today by senior managing editor Mike Oreskes.

“Amanda is a leader and a fine example of a new generation of journalists born and raised online, in real time, across multiple mediums,” Oreskes said. “Those skills will be vital in her new role as head of one of our busiest and most watched news centers.”

Barrett was appointed deputy east editor in 2008, involved in establishing the AP’s new regional desk in Philadelphia.

Prior to joining the AP, Barrett served as the editor of amNY.com, the website for amNewYork, Newsday’s free daily paper in New York City. Barrett was previously editor of Newsday.com.

A Virginia native, Barrett graduated from Queens College.

Reporter fight! Reporter fight! There has been considerable buzz about the article detailing the last moments of the Deepwater Horizon in the New York Times, but AP reporter Harry Weber says in an email that it is “patently false” and “laughable.” He rips the article written by David Barstow, David Rhode and Stephanie Saul, claiming that the AP has had many versions of the same details that the Times says have just become available.

Romenesko has the entire email, which you can read after the jump:

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The Associated Press recently released the results of its annual top stories poll. The stories were voted on by editors and news directors from newspapers across the country. Here’s the list:

1. The BP Oil Spill
2. Health Care Overhaul
3. Republicans Gain Control of the House
4. The Economy
5. Haiti Earthquake
6. Tea Party Movement
7. Chilean Miners
8. Iraq
9. Wikileaks
10. Afghanistan

Popular stories that somehow got left off the list include Arizona’s immigrations laws, the Icelandic volcano eruptions, and Steve in accounting finally getting caught stealing paper clips.

The Associated Press‘ president and CEO Tom Curley spoke before the Kentucky Press Association today, emphasizing the importance of the Freedom of Information Act and a free press.

Curley focused on the AP’s insistence on gaining access to federal documents, and going to court to get access when necessary. “AP went to court in nearly 40 cases in the past year, either by itself or in collaboration with other news organizations, to clear the path to information or proceedings the public was entitled to hear about,” he said.

After listing some of the many cases where the AP has successfully fought for the right to access to information, Curley also touched upon the importance of fighting for laws that will keep access to that information available:

“In these changing times, all the old rules and all the old tools still apply…shoe leather, digging, developing sources, skepticism, shrewdness and intuition. And these days we also can make use of new tools..databases, statistical analysis, social networking, and all the research skills it takes to extract newsworthy information from them.”

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It would be impossible to touch upon the many ways in which different media outlets are covering the tragedy unfolding in Haiti after this week’s earthquake. But while some outlets, like The New York Post, are back to business as usual as the situation in the Caribbean continues to unfold, other outlets are doing excellent, around the clock work and adding innovative social media projects as well.

As the quake rocked Haiti earlier this week, networks and news nets packed up reporters and shipped them to the tiny island nation as quickly as they could. CNN’s Anderson Cooper, NBC’s Ann Curry and Brian Williams, ABC’s Diane Sawyer, CBS’s Katie Couric and Fox News’ Steve Harrigan and Bill Hemmer were among the reporters on the ground. But not all coverage was equal. Today, James Rainey praised CNN in the Los Angeles Times, while criticizing Fox News for not giving the breaking news more air time:

“CNN’s determination to stick with the news stands in stark contrast to its competitors, particularly Fox News, that in prime time have increasingly been committed to building their brands with political commentary over straight reporting.”

In newspapers, we’ve seen some superb coverage from The New York Times, including a large, gut-wrenching photo on today’s front page. The paper’s Web site is filled with photos and videos from the epicenter of the destruction, and its staff has established a site where people can submit photos of missing loved ones. The Times has also created a Facebook page dedicated to news and information of the earthquake and its recovery.

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The tension between news orgs and Google has finally come to a head after a year of growing unease and muddled Internet copyright laws.

While Rupert Murdoch has been very vocal about wanting The Wall Street Journal and other News Corp. entities’ stories pulled from Google News, other groups like the Associated Press have been more quietly pushing for different terms of their contract with the search engine. The AP’s contract with Google News is set to expire at the end of January.

As of the time of this article, no new AP stories have appeared in Google News since December 23, which some are speculating is a power-play on Google’s part: akin to Fox threatening to pull their content from Time-Warner every time their contract expires. Except, as TechCrunch noted in an article yesterday, the deal works the opposite way on the Internet, “distribution is king, not content.”

Without all the incoming traffic that Google provides to news organizations, will media moguls relent and admit that they need the powerful search engine? Or will the AP, like Murdoch, start going to similar sites like Microsoft’s Bing out of spite for the corporate giant?

Read More: Foxy Tactics: Google News Pulls The AP’s Content As Contract Comes Up For Renewal –TechCrunch

Lesson to AP: Don’t Mess with the Google –BayNewser

Rupert Murdoch‘s Dow Jones & Co announced today that effective immediately (their words, not ours) former Dow Jones Newswires editor Andrew Dowell will be heading up a new “corporate group” that will be covering the goings-on at large companies such as IBM, GE, and “New York retail and fashion.”

The Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Robert Thomson clarifies:

“We formed the New York corporate group to focus on the importance and raise the visibility of the main corporate beats that the Journal covers. This group will also help to strengthen the cooperation between Newswires and Journal reporters.”

So think: a whole network of wire reporters focused entirely on New York businesses. Sounds like the Journal wants to make itself the go-to publication for covering our fair city and the compa

This is just the latest in Dow Jones’ moves to restructure the way it covers the news. Earlier this week, the Journal publisher unveiled plans to combine is consumer arm of its news coverage with the enterprise operations — or the newswire. Today’s news shows Dow Jones’ first attempt to split up this new combined division into smaller, more manageable (we would imagine) beats.

Press release after the jump.

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