In truth, few can offer the breadth of service of Associated Press. In truth, few need it.
The dispute at the moment involving about 100 newspapers and AP focuses on rates, on tiers of service and how they're defined, on ownership of content and how it can be shared, and on a general upset among papers that in their darkest moments AP isn't bending sufficiently to help them weather what looks like a protracted storm.
In a few isolated cases --- by no means common in the industry --- some papers are beginning to form regional alliances to share copy and serve notice they'll live without AP some time in the future (AP requires a two-year severance notice, so the revenue will keep arriving until 2010).
But CNN has sensed an opening and stepped in with an offer to provide a text service to complement the extensive audio/video elements it now sells to television, radio and online media. It has invited papers to come see the proposed expansion this week in Atlanta, and the New York Times provides an overview.

It'll be worth paying attention to the impact of Politico's offer to provide news content free to sites (and their papers) that, in turn, share online revenue from its national advertising.
This is the first major example of how a new economic model is emerging in syndication and services. Rather than subscribe to a service and sell advertising on your own, the service's content and advertising are provided and the outlet receives the editorial material free and a share of the ad revenue attached to that content.
In the U.S., a handful of news outlets are serving notice of displeasure with The Associated Press (the Newark Star-Ledger has started to publish without AP content, even though it's still in the cooperative, while a handful of other dailies have said they intend to leave when their contracts expire).
It will bear watching whether this move into a link economy will serve as a win-win.
Full disclosure: Our chain left The Canadian Press a year ago and redirected those funds into an enlarged Canwest News Service. Other international services, offset our loss of The AP, which has an exclusive contract with CP in Canada.

Conventional media are by now used to blogs hauling in large parts of stories and using them as source material for postings. It's called the "fair use" provision, and frankly, without it all sorts of journalism big and small wouldn't be committed.
But a recent scuffle in the U.S. involving The Associated Press is an indication of some new testiness in this area. Last week The AP warned The Drudge Retort (not to be confused with The Drudge Report) that it was overstepping AP's copyright  (in one case, by using 79 words) on seven of its posts.
The move sent a lot of bloggers into a new sphere of outrage and indignation, and this weekend The AP backed down (although it still wants the seven postings changed) and suggested it's going to get to work on a policy to govern the ground.
This is a significant move, in that it could start to establish boundaries upon which conventional organizations (and, they would hope, the courts) define the legal protection of their copyrighted material. In turn, that could create new guides for permissible use of content by others.