AP CEO Tom Curley hits the nail on the head with a speech last night that urged news executives to leave their “institutional ignorance” behind and step up to the new realities of the web. “Editors need to stop pining for the old world and intensify the leading to the new one,” he said. “The first thing that has to go is the attitude…. Readers and viewers are demanding to captain their information ships. Let them.”
Absolutely. Bravo. But here’s where it gets interesting. “The portals are running off with our best stuff, and we’re afraid or unable to make or enforce deals that drive fair value,” he said. “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.†PaidContent has some analysis on Curley’s portal remarks, which are certainly interesting in light of AP’s recent deal with Google and the massive newspaper consortium that has signed with Yahoo.
Finally, while Curley urges the news industry to change, he also has a huge job on his hands to evolve AP before the internet makes his own company irrelevant. I’ve written before how the web is challenging AP’s core model, and a recent pricing structure change appears to be AP’s first efforts to adjust to the tides of change. So stay tuned…