Late on Friday, Associated Press executive editor Kathleen Carroll sent around a memo noting the closure of asap, the A.P.'s multimedia attempt to keep up with the kids. asap, said Carroll, was a "wildly inventive source of stories and sounds and pictures and video unlike those found anywhere else" and a "terrific journalism success," which was good at everything except, you know, making any money. (But what did them in? Was it the content-free Q&A with Jonathan Safran Foer? Was it their insistence on addressing the youngster via use of the second person?) No word yet on what's going to happen to the unit's 24 staffers, but with all the prize-winning journalism they've created over the last two years, it shouldn't be too hard for them to find other work. Full memo below.

We all had a good chuckle back in October when the AP announced the launch of 'asap,' a new newswire service so youthy and hipness-oriented that it has no need for capitalization in its name. Today, we checked back in and found the asap kids still busily reinventing journalism. For example, via "Assignment: You," You can suggest a story topic, and asap's reporters might cover it! No one had ever thought of that before, except possibly the people over at Assignment Zero, whose volunteer virtual open source newsroom thing David Carr discussed today. But asap's You-journalism is still cooler because it is all multimedia-oriented: "Have an idea that relies on sights and sounds? Be sure to include that; we at asap are pretty handy with still cameras, video cameras and audio recorders." Not as handy as the dude who posts videos of his armpit farting out the headlines on YouTube, probably, but give them time to catch up to You.

An Associated Press insider told us a little background on that totally radical asap story we "grooved on" yesterday.

Ever since the Associated Press' Current TV-esque ill-advised new youth-targeted newswire asap — all lowercase, no periods — "dropped," as the hip-poppers say, the results, as you'd expect, have been like the scene in an "urban" comedy in which a middle-aged white character actor talks like Snoop Dogg — equally embarrassing to young, old, black, and white.