Around the Net
AP: News Orgs 'Cannot Despair'
- PaidContent.org, Friday, November 2, 2007 11 AM
From the transcript of Thursday's annual Knight Bagehot dinner: "We--the news industry--have come to that fork in the road," Curley said. "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."
Amidst the doom and gloom brought on by the commoditization of news--whereby Google and Yahoo act like a Costco or Wal-Mart for news--Curley told his peers that the industry cannot despair, and must get its collective head "around the most important fact of all: we work in a growth industry." All the bad energy "obscures terrific opportunities," which almost exclusively lie in partnering with the Googles and Yahoos of the Web. New distribution deals can no longer be one-sided, promotional deals, he said, because these days many people won't go beyond their Yahoo or Google home pages to read news.
