Press Releases

10/09/2009

Remarks by Tom Curley
President and CEO/The Associated Press
Xinhua Beijing Media Summit
Oct. 9, 2009


President Li, I salute you for your leadership and vision in organizing this summit. The timing could not be better. The Associated Press and I are honored to join with all your guests in exchanging ideas at this moment of profound economic, technical and cultural change. We especially are pleased to be in Beijing at this moment – at the 60th anniversary celebration for the People’s Republic of China.

The marketplace for news content is growing. More people in more places seek out news more often than ever. Yet, we don’t get paid appropriately for our hard work and the risks we take.

Free-riders and pirates are claiming they’re entitled to our property. And we face challenges in adapting to a world where our former customers – consumers of news – easily can help produce or report the news. Whether you live in west Texas or west China, news can come from tweets even before agencies as AP or Xinhua have found out and begun their reporting.

Much about this era and its dislocating technologies is good. Much requires us to adjust as well. President Li has called us together to share our ideas about priorities and hopefully, some efforts at maintaining our relevance. Thank you, President Li, for both this opportunity and, as ever, your gracious and spirited hospitality. You make any visit to Beijing very special and memorable.

Rather than offer one more speech on the pitfalls and potential of the Internet, I’d like to present one concept. We call it the game-changer. President Li is an avid basketball fan, so I believe he will appreciate this concept.

In 1986, an organization known for its intransigence made a small change to a very popular game that it governed for the universities in the United States. The organization, the NCAA, painted an arc on the basketball courts, a semi-oval line radiating 19 feet 9 inches from a 10-foot high basket.

The game changed immediately. Teams were rewarded with three points for successes behind the new arc. Strategies changed. Teams recruited players with an array of skills to counterbalance opponents with one very tall player who dominated scoring from a very short distance.

The court, though finite, suddenly was expanded, as spacing spread to half the playing surface instead of the so-called “paint” right underneath the basket. Defenses that continued to pack the paint would then do so at their peril. Premium scoring was taking place from a new frontier.

As we imagine a future for media, this simple basketball metaphor seems to resonate. It suggests the value of avoiding the trap of looking for something big enough to change the big picture. In fact, the small changes drive real innovation.

To be a game-changer, find breakthroughs to common challenges.

Based on all that we’ve learned about digital news distribution and consumption over the past few years, the game for agencies is no longer just about satisfying business customers. It’s about working with business customers to engage the end users of the news, regardless of whether we’re reaching them through our own application on the iPhone or on the pages of a customer’s Web site.

In the next couple years, all news organizations face the same mission – get all the way across the burning bridge from analog to digital journalism and to make the difficult choices that this crossing presents.

The choices are harder than ever. The culture and the economy have changed along with the technology of the digital age. The changes are so radical and pervasive that after nearly 15 years of doing business on the Internet, news organizations are still testing long-held assumptions about what the other side of the digital bridge actually looks like.

From all visible signs, it’s not a place where a news organization can survive by just doing business as usual, creating and marketing content. Indeed, it often appears as if the more our content is distributed, the more our pricing declines.

And yet the audience on the other side of the bridge seems to be having fun. They’re doing other things besides reading news stories – like connecting with their friends on Facebook, networking through LinkedIn, writing blogs by the millions and following interesting people, places and things on Twitter.

Even before they started paying more attention to each other than to Web sites, users had adopted search as their online compass for everything including news. That easy-to-use tool led them to cultivate new sources for what they sought. Wikipedia, once a user-generated curiosity, now sits atop the leaderboard of news and information providers with a staggering monthly audience of 60 million users.

The biggest names in journalism are struggling to find their place in this new game, much as the ponderous big men of the paint struggled to compete with the smaller, more fleet-footed outside shooters from the three-point arc in basketball. A simple change disrupted, and improved, that game. The smart players and coaches adapted.

Discussion of how to change AP’s approach to digital news quickly led to the almost embarrassingly simple idea of an AP news blog. We, like others, had in the recent past looked at this approach, tried it in limited ways and moved on.

But this time we decided to join the fray in a way that could be game-changing – look at blogging as the foundation for a model of audience engagement.

Rather than work only with theory, the team decided to put a real model in play – an experiment around the week-long Sonia Sotomayor Supreme Court confirmation hearings in July.

The blog idea served as the center of gravity for the new model, and other audience channels were connected to create an experimental new “ecosystem.” Twitter became a facility for direct user comments and interaction. Links back and forth to member news providers, recruited in advance, were included to test the blog’s ability to move traffic around a network.

The experience provided a model for what a collaborative approach to a networked news environment might look like – key ingredients being a major portal as a traffic hub, social media like Twitter for audience input and member participation to create the network effect.

The combination was very successful from all perspectives. Yahoo’s news traffic jumped 20 percent compared to the norm for AP stories. Participating newspapers more than doubled their Web traffic from Yahoo. Twitter drove 27 percent more traffic to Yahoo than normal, and AP’s blog attracted triple the traffic of the regular news story. Not incidentally, we estimate the net potential new revenue generated by the effort to be at least $200,000 greater than expenses.

The experiment also provided a reminder of a couple basic lessons for any wire service – live or real-time still matters and context – an effort to make sense of the cluttered news world – is what many news consumers seek.

President Li and others will recognize that the efforts to build traffic and relevance with customers cover only part of the game – the offensive part. Defense is just as necessary to win. And we content creators have been too slow to react to free exploitation of news content by third parties without input or permission.

Random distribution of traffic by aggregators such as search engines directs audience and revenue away from those who invest in original news reports but assures the aggregators and their ad networks of a stream of revenue based on aggregation and indexing of published news content.

Crowd-sourcing web services such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook have become preferred consumer destinations for breaking news, displacing Web sites of traditional news publishers.

To turn the tide, AP is creating a News Registry – a rights management and tracking system.

Participation in the News Registry would discourage unauthorized exploitation of news content by third parties and promote uses that benefit participating news publishers. Implementation of digital protocols that convey rules pertaining to access and use of published news content would enable publishers to pursue individual and collective licensing opportunities.

We also intend to create a new set of products and distribution opportunities across various digital customer segments to improve the value of news content overall.

AP’s members have agreed to participate in a NewsMap or a constantly updated index of original news content submitted to the News Registry to steer aggregator traffic, including from search engines, to the Web sites of participating publishers, benefiting the publishers in terms of audience and revenue terms.

Finally, AP is creating a NewsGuide or an aggregated body of unique news content, curated by news editors. The NewsGuide would enable news publishers together to create a preferred web destination for consumers of breaking news, which also would serve as a conduit to related content displayed on the publisher Web sites.

We call this effort AP3P or Protect, Point and Pay. Step one is to protect published news content against unauthorized exploitation. Step two is to aggregate and index published news content so that aggregators can better point their users to the published content. Step three is to enable new content licensing models for use of the published content with support for payment models that individual publishers may adopt.

AP would manage these activities under a governance structure that complies with applicable antitrust and competition laws.

The strength of AP3P lies in its news registry-based governance structure, its core principles of mutual cooperation and benefit, and the new content licensing models that it can enable in the marketplace.

The News Registry will use a common taxonomy and format around intellectual property rights and licensing rules. It will reflect common understanding around the aggregation and indexing of published news content and will enable participating publishers to share mutually in new licensing opportunities whether based on subscriptions or advertising.

There also is one more “P” that’s important. Going forward, AP will license only those who agree to the principles of Protect, Point and Pay.

We will no longer tolerate the disconnect between the people who devote themselves – at great human and economic cost – to gathering the news of public interest and those who profit from it without supporting it.

The public must have broad access to the news, and digital distribution can enhance that access. That distribution must occur in such a way that it supports newsgathering in the public interest – for those engaged in the resource-intensive work of reporting on government actions to those who risk their lives covering global conflicts, and to all the news coverage that has the potential to help people improve their lives.

Basketball painted a line on the court. We content providers must understand the changing game of distribution and make a mark to support the future of news-gathering that serves the public interest.

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