Is it common to see AP articles published in different newspapers weeks apart?

Question

This may seem like an irrelevant question, but I just noticed a newspaper article in the Houston Chronicle (Oct. 21) that had previously been published in the Washington Post (Oct. 13). The article was about oil in Angola. It is an Associated Press article. Is this common practice? Is all of our news recycled?

Answer 1

Yes, it is a common practice (although a week-long lag that you have observed is rather atypical).

Only the largest newspapers can afford to have correspondents; foreign correspondents are particularly expensive. But newspapers still want to cover national and world news. So they subscribe to newsfeeds by news agencies (AP, Reuters, France Press, Bloomberg, etc.) that collect news stories and report them in bulk.

Sometimes, the flow changes direction; news agencies carry a story originally reported by a local newspaper...

Answer 2

Yes, it's not uncommon. Sometimes as the story begins to spread you'll see it in more papers than it was originally published in, later on, because more people are catching on to it.