Editors need to stop pining for the old world – says president of the AP

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The President of the Associated Press (AP) told a gathering of executives the news industry had reached a 'fork in the road' and that 'editors need to stop pining for the old world and intensify the leading to the new.'

Tom Curley made a bullish keynote speech at last night's Knight-Bagehot dinner in New York in which he also rallied against internet portals for 'running off with our [news providers] best stuff' - yet adding later that news providers needed to do deals with portals (like AP has with Google ) as 'great content always has needed great distribution'.

"The irony of the disrupted news economy of the 21st century is that the news is hot, but the news business is not…somewhere in that mysterious disconnect lies the future of news - and some great opportunities for content providers," he said.

"We - the news industry - have come to that fork in the road. We must take bold, decisive steps to secure the audiences and funding to support journalism's essential role in both our economy and democracy, or find ourselves on an ugly path to obscurity.

"The portals are running off with our best stuff, and we're afraid or unable to make or enforce deals that drive fair value. Revenue lines in a good month are flat. In other months, they inspire the merchants of debt to imagine how they might take us over and show us how much smarter they are."

The AP issued a press release with the full transcript of Curley's speech, in which he said news providers were guilty of an 'institutional arrogance' which had done more to harm the industry than any internet portal.

He also stated that the AP was developing a new distribution model that would utilise Web 2.0 elements like widgets to enable more relevant and timely news to arise.

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"Our focus must be on becoming the very best at filling people's 24-hour news needs. That's a huge shift from the we-know-best, gatekeeper thinking. Sourcing, fact-gathering, researching, story-telling, editing, packaging aren't going away. These professional skills still should command premium wages. But the readers and viewers are demanding to captain their information ships. Let them."

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"Our own reporters ridicule our digital transition plans as one great organization or another faces ownership changes, most notably Knight Ridder, Tribune and Dow Jones. When an experienced media operator steps up, such as Murdoch, he gets vilified.

"News Corp. has been a hugely successful, long-term operator. Even before taking ownership, Murdoch has changed financial journalism for the better in this city. People at other organizations know Murdoch is not afraid. They have begun to make decisions to invest or redeploy - decisions they had postponed for years.

"That is exactly what must happen. We who rule content must start making decisions, the ones that deliver journalism for another generation of readers and viewers."

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"Those of us in content must accept today's reality. The marketplace has flipped. For the last couple hundred years, content has carried ads. In today's internet, ads carry content. Let me be emphatic about one point. I'm not suggesting the ad department or advertisers tell us what to write. Or that content has in any way become subservient. Simply, the structure for advertising is changing from mass to targeted.

"When you drop a cookie on someone in the digital space, the ads you serve that viewer become up to 200 times more valuable. Dave Morgan, formerly chairman of Tacoda and now at AOL, puts it pretty simply. He says the future is about serving ads to people, not to pages or programs."

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"AP last week presented to its board a dramatic new distribution plan for news that would surface more relevant and timely news through the internet engines and enable linking and viral sharing of news through widgets and the like."

Full transcript of his speech here .