Prepared Remarks by Tom Curley (compare against delivery)
President and CEO/The Associated Press
AP Annual Meeting
New York City
May 7, 2007


Burl Osborne is a unique figure in AP history. For 20 years he worked as an AP reporter, bureau chief and editor. He then moved to the Dallas Morning News where he demonstrated a vast capacity for innovation, first as editor and later as publisher and corporate executive for Belo.

As AP chair, he combined his passion for the mission and people of AP with extraordinary creative energy and a love for this profession. Burl infused AP, its board and leadership with the very best principles of governance, especially transparency and member focus. He also insisted AP step up to the challenges of the times by embracing innovation while upholding its timeless values of accuracy and fairness.

Burl has been a great leader and a special friend, full of ideas, generous with his time and always eager to take on the biggest issues of digital transformation. For 47 years of steadfast devotion, competitive journalism and inspired leadership -- from a correspondent in Bluefield, West Virginia, in 1960 to chairman of the board -- Burl deserves a very warm salute.

AP also welcomes Dean Singleton to his role as chair. Dean not only believes in newspapers, he’s still buying them at 11 times cash-flow. Dean has worked very hard on behalf of AP, most recently as chairman of the revenue committee. He will be a forceful advocate of what’s right for members. And no one in the business works harder on behalf of this business than Dean.

Working for the business is what everyone in the business must do today with exceptional fervor. AP is keenly aware of the challenges facing members. For the second consecutive year, the AP board has agreed to freeze basic assessments for domestic print and broadcast members. There will be no general assessment increase for 2008. We do expect to raise prices for certain premium services.

In addition, AP management later this year will present the board with options that by 2009 would introduce greater choice in services and pricing for members.

Members want more locally relevant content. AP can provide it through wider access to a complete database of multimedia content. Members want to use AP content in a greater variety of platforms and publications. We can make that happen through enterprise-wide licensing. Members want the ability to experiment in a time of rapid change. We can enable that through more flexible licensing and pricing. And, some members do not want to pay for types of AP content they don’t use. We can restructure a portion of newspaper assessments to accommodate that.

All those changes are made possible by AP’s new technology infrastructure. Existing services were built on technical limits of how AP could deliver content and were designed for single-purpose use by a traditional daily newspaper, television or radio station.

Because AP editors cannot customize a wire for each member, the news report is delivered in small, medium or large volume – think of it as three diameters of the same fire hose. The only difference is geographical or state news.

We propose repackaging AP text services to enable access to all AP breaking news regardless of geography. Corpus Christi, for instance, could monitor what’s happening on the other side of the Gulf in Tampa-St. Petersburg without paying extra. Or a newspaper in a riverboat casino town could monitor the gambling industry across the country. Or the cornbelt interests could keep up with ethanol and energy issues from anywhere.

Members would continue to have add-on choices to fit unique publication needs beyond the core report. AP photos and produced online services would remain optional services that members can add as needed. Members who want deeper content beyond the breaking news core report, also could choose from an analysis category and premium tiers of business, sports, lifestyle and entertainment categories.

We also will enable a la carte sales of stories and photos so members have greater flexibility to buy just what they need, when they need it, on top of their core report and other content subscriptions.

AP is developing an infrastructure to create a central database of member content that can handle member-to-member exchange or sharing of local content. Members and others will be able to use AP’s technical infrastructure to share content in a way they define and control – within a state, within a group, or more broadly with other AP members.

In the spirit of the age, we refer to this content management system as AP2.0. In the spirit of history, it’s another example of the cooperation and cost efficiency that have defined our services since 1846.

As a first step this summer, we will launch a beta program designed to help participating members make their content easier to find on the Web. We will organize member text content into categories, index it for search and provide related story links so that members can make better deals with distribution partners.

We expect to expand that beta group in phases through the end of the year and make these Web 2.0 services generally available to the membership by early 2008.

When complete, our suite of services will encompass a full range of needs for digital content providers:

-- Standardized metadata – or the roadmap to digital content – for categorizing and tagging content to enhance search, sharing and linking;
-- Tracking services that can make a digital record of each unique piece of content, track its usage and identify new licensing opportunities;
-- And a content exchange for members to trade stories, photos and multimedia content in a protected, rights-managed environment.

In related projects also under way, we will offer:

-- Customized, multi-media search that would allow journalists to be alerted to breaking news on their beats;
-- An enhanced Internet video player for uploading local video and advertising to your Web site for national syndication.

Content married with technology that enables easy access by users will drive new revenue generation for the industry over the next decade. We can achieve great efficiencies by building shared Web services that address common needs.

In the end, competition should flourish, but we won’t be competing against ourselves to create basic capabilities that all can use to build their digital businesses.

This is a dream many have had in recent years, and it can become a reality, at least in the area of digital content management. And that means we won’t have to rely on distributors – like the search giants – for more than distribution. Indeed, restoring control over the news content will be the overarching principle that drives our efforts.

We all need to remind ourselves and others what it takes to produce great journalism, and to make sure the value of our product isn’t taken for granted in a digital world where content seems to spring fully formed from portals and search engines.

One other principle also guides us: the commitment to the cooperative. We believe the cooperative provides the most comprehensive and relevant news content available anywhere in the world at a fraction of the cost of producing it.

We believe the value of the cooperative was dramatized anew a couple weeks ago as the tragic events unfolded at Virginia Tech.

AP’s Virginia staff got its first inkling of problems at Virginia Tech from a Roanoke Times blog saying shots had been fired in Blacksburg. Karl Magenhofer of WSVA Radio in Harrisonburg soon e-mailed with a report of a shooting at Tech.

AP Richmond contacted the Roanoke Times, which said two photographers were on the scene and more were on the way. Times Blacksburg photographer Alan Kim provided AP members gripping images of students being carried out of Norris Hall. His colleague Matt Gentry quickly followed with photos of police activity.

Roanoke Times photo director Dan Beatty asked AP to handle third-party photo sales and called frequently with story ideas. As the magnitude of the massacre became apparent, AP Bureau Chief Dorothy Abernathy began looking for space for a temporary newsroom. Times managing editor Carole Tarrant offered a house near the campus where the Times produces a Web site.

As the people in this room know too well, covering the news requires experience, money, skill and collaboration. The speed and comprehensiveness of the Virginia Tech report delivered with the full cooperation of the Roanoke Times won praise from editors around the world.

AP is able to undertake these initiatives on behalf of the cooperative because it is in its strongest position ever.

On the financial side, revenues are growing 6 percent despite the assessment freeze. Revenue from electronic products at AP is approaching 20 percent of total revenues, making AP one of the most digitally-transitioned media companies, and AP will achieve record cash-flow.

In technology, our scalable technology platform, eAP, is in place along with a browser, which already gives nearly 10,000 editors and reporters access to multimedia content. The result should be that both you and we are able to integrate content from various databases more easily, create new products faster and for lower cost though an integrated workflow.

All of these services will be ready for the epic news year ahead. Along with the services will come content specially created and packaged by subject or verticals for elections, Iraq, the economy, the Beijing Olympics and entertainment.

As many organizations cut back international reporting, AP has added journalists in Asia, Latin America, Iraq and opened a bureau in North Korea. In North America, AP continues to enhance enterprise reporting, add videos of the day’s top stories and deepen financial content. Our new financial agate package for both in-paper and on-line was launched six months ago and has more than 175 newspapers participating. And more than 1,000 newspapers are part of the on-line video news network launched last year.

There is news, too, on the photo front. AP offers access to the world’s most extensive collection of news photos, including some of the most iconic and important scenes in world history. One of them by Jerusalem-based Oded Balilty was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in breaking news photography. That Pulitzer is the 30th awarded to AP for photography and 49th overall.

And today AP is pleased to announce a very exciting new partnership. Joining AP’s archive will be the unique and certainly one of the most important collections in American history, nearly a century of photos from the collections of Ebony/Jet magazines.

With us today to mark this very special collaboration is the vice president and editorial director of the magazines’ parent company, Johnson Publications. Please welcome Bryan Monroe.

And, you, too, can join the AP photo collection and sales. AP will digitize – at no cost -- up 250 photos of your newspaper’s best work, host them on AP Images, our photo sales site – and share revenues from any sales.

As AP celebrates the work of Oded Balilty and his colleagues around the world and welcomes Ebony/Jet as a business partner, we also note a sad milestone. Two years ago another photographer, Bilal Hussein, was part of the AP team in Iraq that won a Pulitzer Prize. For the last 13 months he has been held in a jail by the US military, and no charges have been filed against him. Bilal’s case has been reviewed extensively. I have been given a Pentagon briefing, and we have sent lawyers to Baghdad to meet with military authorities.

We believe there is no case to be made against Bilal Hussein. In fact, the military has not interrogated him in nearly a year. At a recent media panel at the Museum of Television and Radio, a Pentagon spokesman emphasized that journalists have no right to the battlefield. There is no First Amendment there, he said.

Some things have changed very little in AP’s history. To cover the battle of Gettysburg, AP had to appeal to the Congress. That’s one of many stories behind the stories covered in the new AP book, “Breaking News: How The Associated Press has covered war, peace and everything else.:

“Breaking News” is the first book about AP in 67 years, and it reveals a lot of parallels between journalism then and now. The foreword, written by the late David Halberstam, noted the similarities between war coverage in Iraq and Vietnam.

We have a very short video on the book and the enduring role of journalism and a free press in America.

Thank you.

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