Posts Tagged ‘Tom Curley’

The Associated Press will establish an independent news licensing agency this summer that will offer publishers access to original news content, as well as support for new business models. In addition to AP fare, the News Licensing Group will provide content from more than 1,000 publications.

The AP News Registry, which was first announced in July 2009, will be part of the News Licensing Group, and AP said the entity will be owned by new publishers and hopes to raise funding from the industry.

AP added that nearly 1,000 publications are participating in the News Registry, and it has collected more than 5 billion content impressions around the Web.

AP president and CEO Tom Curley said:

This will be a game-changer for news providers worldwide. It’s pro-competitive and it’s pro-consumer, and it will be a leader in the digital information business. We’ll be looking at development opportunities and seeking content commitments from publishers. We will move beyond text to photos and video and expand internationally later this year.

The Associated Press president and CEO Tom Curley announced the impending creation of a rights clearinghouse for original content, as well as white-label apps and content modules for hand-held devices, at the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association‘s annual convention in Austin, Texas, Monday.

The new rights clearinghouse would be a separate entity created by AP and other news organizations to provide rights clearance and privacy tools; ways to license content from publishers; and media intelligence services, building on the capabilities of the AP News Registry, originally announced in July 2009, which allows participants to tag, track, and measure use of their content online.

Curley said:

The clearinghouse will answer a need we heard from multiple businesses for an efficient mechanism to access content from a range of news providers for a variety of uses. This extends to the news industry an approach that has worked successfully in other industries with similar challenges around digital usage.

Both of these initiatives address immediate, crucial needs of the news industry. They offer new revenue possibilities as news-consumption patterns increasingly fragment.

John Hockenberry, host of public radio’s “The Takeaway” opened a discussion with AP president and CEO Tom Curley and Knight Foundation president Alberto Ibarguen at the We Media summit Wednesday with that thesis.

More and more consumers don’t know where they’re getting their daily headlines, because of the Web’s “river of news” from which most of us now get our information — including from services like this.

It is that “river of news” that continues to chip away at the traditional service provided by the nation’s oldest news co-operative, the AP, founded in 1846.

“We’re owned by U.S. newspapers and that is a gift and a treasure,” says Curley. “Being able to aggregate and work with the industry is what makes us special, the fact that the consumers don’t understand that, is not a problem. What matters is that we’re able to get our funding and support our journalists going forward at the rate everyone expects.”

With so much information flowing down the river, Ibarguen had this warning: “The first amendment is about to come under serious attack because of the amount of speech being protected.”

Despite the warnings and the uncertainties associated with the transformational state of the media, Curley and Ibarguen are bullish on the future of media.

Asked what their favorite new media tools are, Ibarguen talked up Spot.US, the open source project that funds community-powered reporting. Curley was most excited about new cameras — still and video — being put “in the hands of the consumers.” The AP worked with Canon, buying up the production line of one model, then dispatching dozens of them to the Vancouver Olympics. Those cameras captured some of the most memorable shots of the games, including the one above taken by the AP’s Chris O’Meara of Canada’s game winning, overtime goal to win Ice Hockey gold.

The We Media conference continues today at the University of Miami.