If the St. Louis Post-Dispatch went a  week without content from the Associated Press, would you notice?

The Chicago Tribune and other Tribune newspapers hope to learn just how essential Associated Press content is to them — and their readers.  Tribune media writer Phil Rosenthal reports that the chain will experiment the week of Nov. 8 by using as little AP content as possible.

According to Rosenthal:

The goal, as the papers review costs and needs, is to see whether severing ties with the news cooperative next fall is a viable option.

Rosenthal reports:

Some content Tribune Co. papers get from the Associated Press, such as sports statistics, will still be published during the experiment. The company also said that if the AP is the only available source for a report considered vital, it will use that AP coverage. But the company wants to see to what kind of void the absence of AP stories and photos would have.

Besides the content provided by the staff of its own titles, Tribune Co. newspapers will draw from such news sources as Reuters, the Washington Post, New York Times, Agence France Presse, Cable News Network, Global Post, Bloomberg and McClatchy newspapers during its AP-less trial. Not all of those sources are normally available to Tribune Co. papers.

Much of the wire content that appears in the Post-Dispatch is provided by AP. But the newspaper also uses stories from the New York Times News Service,  McClatchy-Tribune, Bloomberg, Lee Newspapers and various syndicate offerings.