Tom Curley, CEO of the Associated Press, declared today that "the Internet has become our entire business environment, not just another medium for distribution," and challenged online journalists to become activists in taking the message back to their employers that "we can't afford to continue to operate in separate silos."
Delivering a keynote speech at the
Online News Association conference in Hollywood, he said a change is taking place right now in which broadband access, Web search, RSS feeds, and weblogs are coming together to "unlock the content from any vessel in which we try to contain it."
We are entering a future in which "the franchise is not the newspaper, the broadcast station, or even the website," he said. "The franchise is the content itself. ... Get ready for everything to be Googled, deep-linked, or Tivo-ized."
Curley acknowledged the difficulty of building a new economic model for journalism built around "atomic content," but pointed to bright spots in the transformation, especially the "emergence of an engaged audience" that can be seen forming around the news in the context of weblogs.
