04/29/2010


AP Press Release


Remarks by Tom Curley
President and CEO/The Associated Press
AP Annual Meeting
New York
April 29, 2010

When people ask about the pace of change in our business, they usually expect an answer that involves the Internet, social networks or the iPad. While there’s a lot to say on those topics, even more today, the story of change seems most easily illustrated through pictures.

The cooperative has no more valuable asset than its news photography. And no part of our business has undergone more change. Here is one measure of media’s digital transformation:

AP used its first digital camera at the Olympics in Lillehammer in 1994. The image resolution capacity at the time was only about 10 percent of what could be achieved with film. The new cameras AP used in Vancouver had an image resolution quality about 25 percent greater than film.

As we go from annual meeting to annual meeting, or even big breaking news story to bigger breaking news story, keeping perspective on the digital shift can be difficult or even vexing. The pace of change is accelerating relentlessly. And you can see it everywhere you look – even in the pixels of a photo.

For anyone in a media company, the last decade and a half has been marked by a universal struggle to keep up.

We believe there is a new day just ahead, a better day that enables us and our member companies to participate more fully in the opportunities created by the digital shift. The new day is arriving because the consumer’s experience of the news is about to change even more dramatically than it has in the first 15 years of the Internet.

When news first shifted online, consumers simply got more immediate access to the content we already were producing, and we mostly created products that were close cousins to our analog offerings.

The arrival of smart phones and tablets, including devices like the iPad, ushers in a new era for consumers. That era can be almost idyllic. At long last, news consumers should be able to get the content they want when they want it and even where they want it. And we, as news producers, have a second chance to innovate.

As devices take consumers beyond “pointing and clicking” on a computer, they will gain even more control over their own news consumption. While the Web today makes a vast amount of information available, access is pretty much limited to surfing and searching. As a result, you get what you stumble upon, and, more than not, you settle for good enough.

Tomorrow’s experience will burst beyond the Web and enable us as news providers to deliver a much broader range of products and services across a much wider array of devices. We should harness that new freedom to the fullest extent possible and show our audiences that there’s more to the news than snippets and thumbnail photos. “Good enough” simply is not good enough.

As we’ve seen around the world, freedom to consume and communicate is what matters most to people. The last year showed that even those most dedicated to repression – including the Iranians and Chinese – failed to keep freedom of expression constrained behind great firewalls.

In this country, news is second only to e-mail in popularity on the Internet, and news consumption continues to grow. That’s why we’re so excited about breakthroughs like the leap we took in photos at the Olympics. We can improve the quality of the news experience and restore value to assets that have been commoditized on the Web.

Our photographers have captured many of the most iconic images in the history of photojournalism, and the last year has been no exception.

Here’s a shot of Team Canada’s star Sidney Crosby just before he would score in a shoot-out against Switzerland to keep Canada alive in the first round of Olympic hockey. Note the detail, including the fans in their red-and-white, maple leaf jerseys.

The other thing you need to know about the pictures taken in Vancouver is that they were transmitted to the world from within seconds to a couple minutes after the action occurred.
Sports are only part of a world revealed with our photos. Conflict is another. Here is a dramatic picture from the demonstrations in Tehran. And here’s another from David Guttenfelder in Afghanistan, who captured a soldier’s rapid response to a night-time attack and dressed in his pink boxer shorts.

Julie Jacobson, who took the Crosby photo in Vancouver, also produced one of the most controversial pictures ever of a Marine who later died of his wounds. Julie helped explain how last August became the deadliest month up until that time for U.S. troops in Afghanistan. I’d like to introduce Julie to you, but she’s on an extended embed in Afghanistan as the U.S. prepares to launch a major new offensive.

Now, if you made enough clicks on the Internet, you might have seen some of these pictures. But probably not in a form that brought them fully to life. And probably not with background information on what it took to capture the images.

Imagine a service that immersed the viewer in an absorbing visual experience of the news, built around images like these, that told you the story behind the pictures.

With the spread of personal devices, we can create those kinds of experiences, and also build new revenue streams. Mobile will move us closer to consumers, and tablets will pull them in.

AP has been moving steadily toward this new territory over the past several years, and you’ve heard me document that progress each year at these annual gatherings. Our first step was to create a database platform for our content, which put stories, photos, video and multimedia into a single repository that allowed editors to customize search.

Next, we overlaid it with a metadata scheme created specifically for news, including locations, topics and famous names, so that all the content could be identified easily and linked automatically.

We then offered those capabilities to the membership in the form of our Digital Cooperative program, and more than 1,500 members have signed on.

As part of that program, we developed a system to ingest content from all those members, which enabled us to produce AP Mobile, our first aggregated consumer service from AP and the membership. That service is marking its second anniversary this month with 4 million users across all the smart phones.

Last year we began work on an important new piece of the strategy called the news Registry. With the Registry we have created the infrastructure to tag and track digital news content and provide a new level of visibility on what content is being consumed and where.
The Registry is unique in providing a view of how content is used beyond a publisher’s own website. That information will be vital to informing our work on our new products.

As we head into this new era of news delivery, we absolutely must improve our understanding of our customers and what they want. We can’t rely on website metrics alone. And we can’t sit by and just wait for search engines to send traffic. We have to deliver.

Already, we’ve brought more than 200 member newspapers onto the Registry platform in the beta period, and we’re planning to have 600 by the July 14th production launch. By year’s end, we hope to bring on everyone who is interested in tagging and tracking their content.

Beyond analytics, the Registry also will set the stage for a new way of doing business as a cooperative. The Registry will enable publishers to assert how they want others to make use of their content, setting the stage for the creation of new products and revenue streams that content providers can benefit from.

The vision of the Registry is to ensure that those who go to the effort and expense of covering the news are able to participate fully and fairly in the revenue their work generates in the digital world.

Here’s a brief video on the Registry and its benefits.

With the Registry about to roll out, we’re adding a business unit called AP Gateway to develop and manage new business opportunities for Registry players. The Gateway will become just what its name implies – a launching pad for new products and services from AP and other interested publishers.

The concept for Gateway was born a couple years ago when we invited our members to join us in AP Mobile. The same spirit of entrepreneurism that inspired AP Mobile will drive our future offerings.

The first product from Gateway was a news application for the Apple iPad that harnesses the same content as the mobile service.

We’ll be following up soon with applications that incorporate a paid subscription model and offer AP members the opportunity to participate in joint applications or separate, white-label versions.

In addition, we are working on an AP Top 25 offering that will pull together a network of members interested in creating a range of collegiate football products for the Web, mobile and the tablets.

We think there are a number of vertical content areas, like football, where the combined strength of AP and its members could be unmatched. This will be prime territory for future Gateway projects.

Beyond that, we expect to offer our content partners a variety of ways to take their content to market, both individually and collectively, taking advantage of new business models, including the wide variety of pay models now under development. As part of the Gateway’s build-out, we plan to engage partners to help us develop an industry-leading platform for e-commerce sales and subscriptions.

We believe the infrastructure we are putting in place will make it possible for publishers to set rights, apply tags, create products and execute sales direct to consumers. At this time of rebuilding in the news industry, it makes sense to bring these capabilities together and scale them up to the level we need to compete.

Of course, none of this means we’re straying from our core newsgathering mission. It only reinforces our commitment to cover every important story from around the world and across every state in this country.

In fact, we are pleased to report that our reputation for accuracy has grown even stronger in the chaos of the digital news universe.

We now lay claim to a new kind of achievement: stories we didn’t write because they were wrong, but which others did report in their rush to be first and their willingness to make mistakes and fix them later. Our reputation as the authoritative source for breaking news will continue to be the bedrock of AP’s success in the expanding marketplace.

Finally and significantly, despite the challenges and adjustments all news organizations have been forced to make in recent years, AP’s staff continues to demonstrate a remarkable, even inspirational dedication to its mission. As I have traveled in recent months to visit them or work alongside them, I have found a group of journalists and those who support them as focused and excited about reporting the news as they ever have been.

Our global reach and depth continue to dominate, and that value to you is validated day in and day out, whether great sports moments are unfolding in Vancouver or the earth literally is erupting as it has in Haiti, Chile, China and Iceland over the past few months.

Here to tell you more about what AP news has been doing is Kathleen Carroll, executive editor.

On the Net:

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Four Incumbents, two new members elected to AP board

AP Board Chairman Dean Singleton's remarks