Press Releases

11/01/2007

Associated Press CEO Curley says in speech that news execs must embrace online distribution

By SETH SUTEL
AP Business Writer

NEW YORK (AP) -- Tom Curley, CEO of The Associated Press, called on news executives Thursday to "stop pining" for the past and adapt to the new ways that news is being distributed and consumed.

Curley said in a speech that news organizations should quit thinking like gatekeepers of information and reach out to people who are accustomed to receiving news in real time online and customizing the ways they see and read it.

"Editors need to stop pining for the old world and intensify the leading to the new one," Curley told a fundraising dinner for the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship, a program at Columbia University for business journalists.

At the same time, Curley said news organizations were partly to blame for the troubles they are experiencing in adapting to the new realities of the news business being wrought by the explosion of Internet use.

"The first thing that has to go is the attitude," Curley said. "Our institutional arrogance has done more to harm us than any portal."

Curley has led AP, a news cooperative owned by its 1,500 daily U.S. newspaper members, since 2003. He called on traditional media companies to cooperate more with online portals such as Yahoo Inc. and said there was still a place for "appointment media" such as evening newscasts or home-delivered newspapers, "but it is a smaller place."

Newspaper publishers have been seeing declining advertising revenues as more readers and advertisers migrate to the Web. Their own revenues from online advertising have also been growing, but not fast enough to make up for the declines in print advertising.

"Our focus must be on becoming the very best at filling people's 24-hour news needs," Curley said. "That's a huge shift from the we-know-best, gatekeeping mentality. ... Readers and viewers are demanding to captain their information ships. Let them."

He also defended Rupert Murdoch, who was the subject of considerable negative coverage during his campaign to acquire Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co. for $5 billion. Curley said Murdoch was "vilified," but that his News Corp. media conglomerate "has been a hugely successful, long-term operator."

Even before formally taking over Dow Jones, Curley said, Murdoch has "changed financial journalism in this city for the better. People at other organizations ... have begun to make decisions to invest or redeploy -- decisions they had postponed for years."