For some reason, Canada’s biggest news service has decided it needs to “brand” itself. Canadian Press, the nationwide, not-for-profit wire service, is running ads through member organizations such as CTV, Transcontinental, the Toronto Star, Sun Media (Quebecor) and others to “add value for Canadian Press member daily newspapers and media clients by ensuring more of their news consumers recognize The Canadian Press brand as the credible source of Canadian and international content in their papers, newscasts and websites.”

Perhaps I’m missing something about the newspaper industry in Canada, but I honestly don’t understand what the point of this is. Canadian Press is a wire service, and it doesn’t sell anything to the public directly. So who cares if the public is even aware of its existence? And why would media outlets want to publicize the fact that they’re too cheap to hire their own journalists and have to rely on the same wire service their competitors get their news from? It’s like if CJAD ran ads reminding people that its morning news headlines were read straight out of The Gazette.

I know CP is sad about CanWest’s empire pulling out this year, and it’s constantly annoyed by the fact that people refer to it as “Canadian Press” instead of “The Canadian Press”, but this advertising campaign looks like a giant waste of money.

The end of the CP press release also adds that the organization will be “phasing out” the use of (CP) and (PC) for Canadian Press and Presse Canadienne stories, in favour of the wire’s complete name. I find this funny because the wire has little control over how its stories appear in print, online or on the air. Many websites use the full name already, while many print publications use the shortened form to save space (especially on briefs that are only a few lines long to begin with). Whether member organizations comply with this edict remains to be seen.

There’s an interesting trend happening in the news media. As wire services become ubiquitous, providing almost all the content for crappy, journalist-free newspapers like Metro, major news organizations are beginning to realize that they need to provide good, original content to distinguish themselves from these free alternatives. Otherwise, why would people buy their paper or visit their website when they can get the same wire story from another source?

Earlier this summer, CanWest completed its pullout of Canadian Press, the only nationwide news service in Canada. The decision cut CP’s budget by 9 per cent, and had some people crying that the sky was going to fall.

Although we’re only a couple of months into it, that looks unlikely. CP’s reliance on the big papers was already much lower than it had been previously, thanks to these free papers and other organizations like radio stations who are too cheap to have a news staff of their own. They’re also expanding their online presence, providing things like those Flash-based election tickers. (It’ll be interesting to see how CanWest papers handle general elections where the CP wire is of critical importance.)

I’ve heard a lot of people criticize the move, both inside and outside affected newsrooms, because it limits access to news from small regions, and because other outlets will run news they don’t have access to.

But I see it as a good thing. CanWest used some of the money they saved from dumping CP (though very little compared to how much they’re pocketing for shareholders) to expand its CanWest News Service, which before this summer was basically just the newsrooms of CanWest papers and a few reporters scattered in places like Ottawa, New York and Washington D.C. Now instead of one news service, we have two competing ones, and more journalists covering news.

In a similar vein, as of today CNN is no longer a client of Reuters news service. (If your first reaction to that news was “CNN was using Reuters?”, you’re not alone.) Instead, the news channel and Internet news giant will be boosting its own news-gathering, while still using Associated Press copy. That’s probably just some marketing speak and the investments will be trivial, especially when you consider that they were just looking for a better deal, but it’s better than nothing.

Wire services are very important, because they allow small news organizations to get news from far-away places, and provides an alternative to, say, expanding the White House Press Briefing Room to the size of a small stadium.

But in the Internet age, where a story carried by a wire service can be read from hundreds of different websites, news media have to provide strong original reporting to send eyes their way.

It’s vain, self-serving, greedy and transparent, but it’s good for journalism.

UPDATE (Sept. 11): CNN dumping Reuters comes back to bite them in the ass when they couldn’t run the Bin Laden video that Reuters had gained access to and started distributing. I wonder if Reuters paid Bin Laden royalties?