Remarks by Tom Curley
President and CEO/The Associated Press
AP Annual Meeting
San Diego, CA.
April 6, 2009

Today we emphasize one point. AP is fully committed to helping the industry meet the challenges we face together.

Dean– on behalf of his fellow directors and management – has sounded a rallying cry for all of us to protect our content and re-energize our approach to the digital marketplace.

AP has put the necessary pieces in place to help members answer this call.

In my remarks this morning, I'm going to illustrate how members are already using AP ís digital technology and content initiatives to help with revenue-raising or cost-saving strategies. Our hope is to encourage even more initiatives.

Most important, I want to assure everyone that despite the necessary adjustments to the economy, we are evolving with the times to deliver the most valuable news report ever.

From any Web-connected screen in your newsrooms, you have the power to download, package, shape and share more locally relevant content than ever.

You get access to the full range of English-language material and full use of the new technology platforms, which are now in place and providing capabilities that were only imagined a few short years ago.

Members can download any content they want – on demand and across format.

You can:
• upload your own content for exchange with other members
• go mobile on a local and national scale
• integrate content in your own Web pages with a few mouse clicks
• and, switch on a live video feed when the world turns its attention to such things as the inauguration of a new president.

In addition to fulfilling those technology promises, we are restructuring our newsgathering operations domestically to deliver an even better and faster report to members on a regional basis. APís last regional desks will be operational in June in Chicago and Phoenix, following successful launches in Atlanta and Philadelphia.

The regional approach, matching a similar initiative completed outside the U.S., is putting more reporting power on the ground and more multimedia editing expertise in regional hubs that are closer to the action and to you, the members.

A technology overhaul has been fundamental to delivering the enhanced report and to enable you to share and syndicate your own content along with ours.

Four key components of APís new digital infrastructure last year became integrated.

They are:
• a robust database for storing content across media type;
• a metadata system for organizing and linking multimedia content;
• browser-based gateways providing easy access to content;
• and, Web-based feeds and hosted solutions for distributing and presenting content.

Those are the elements of what we call the Digital Cooperative – basically, a searchable warehouse of content that is fully adaptable to a broad range of digital revenue models, including paid content. Rather than push all the content to you down fatter and fatter pipes, the new platform has enabled you to see it all and make your own choices.

The entry point for this new world of member choice is a secure, Web-based login that allows every one of your news staffers to have his or her own view of AP. More than 30,000 personalized accounts have been set up for members over the past two years.

Let's take a look at how this new AP experience is taking shape across the membership, starting with video. Fifteen years ago AP got into the video business. It was a big step, and it was a big risk. And it has paid off big time for this cooperative. Today AP offers you a global video news network. Here is what you get.

(AP video segment )
http://mfile.akamai.com/23931/wmv/ap.download.akamai.com/23931/apvideoHQ.asx

At our annual meeting last year, we introduced AP Mobile, the first product of the Digital Cooperative. More than 1,100 of you have signed up to make your own branded news available on AP Mobile, and monthly traffic has topped 38 million page views. This week we started testing a paid mobile application with Blackberry. Weíll soon be rolling out a pilot program for local ad sales. Many members – like the Las Vegas Review-Journal – are pressing to become the local news leader in mobile.

(AP Mobile segment)
http://mfile.akamai.com/23931/wmv/ap.download.akamai.com/23931/APmobile.asx

With every component of our digital platform available for members, weíre seeing newspapers increasingly tailor content for new products or reshape existing products. Here's what the Savannah Morning News is doing.

(Member Choice segment)
http://mfile.akamai.com/23931/wmv/ap.download.akamai.com/23931/memberChoice.asx

The new AP platform provides a variety of delivery options. You can pull content from our password-protected portals or have it delivered automatically either in the form of Web feeds that move over the Internet or as hosted pages or hosted modules that plug into your own Web site.

In a matter of seconds, a single staff member can create an entire package of stories, photos, inter-actives, audio and video that is updated automatically. Here's one we created in less than a minute that should be of interest to newspapers covering immigration issues.

(AP Custom News on Hosted Platform segment)
http://mfile.akamai.com/23931/wmv/ap.download.akamai.com/23931/CustomNews.asx

A decade ago, AP launched a revenue-sharing program with members who send us their photographs to be sold from AP Images, our commercial image-sales arm. Next month we extend to members a dynamic new e-commerce platform for AP Images. The platform has helped make AP Images our fastest-growing revenue area. In fact, AP Images continued to show revenue and profit growth in this year's first quarter.

The revenue-share program lets members effortlessly take advantage of our worldwide images marketplace. That footprint gets bigger all the time. We recently became the exclusive distributor of NCAA championship photography for commercial use.

Just last week AP became the exclusive licenser of NFL photography for commercial use, winning the business from Getty. Here's a look at some of the ways working with AP Images pays off.

(AP Images segment)
http://mfile.akamai.com/23931/wmv/ap.download.akamai.com/23931/apimages.asx

Finally, news values are AP values, and protecting them is an essential service that AP brings to its members and their audiences. That means stepping up and becoming aggressive about protecting content. Last year, we did just that, and we had several important victories.

As part of our intellectual property governance program, AP brought a claim of hot news misappropriation against a company called All Headline News Media. Recently, the New York federal court handling this case issued a very important ruling on a motion brought by All Headline News.

The court's ruling affirmed the special protection afforded to hot news under a 1918 AP case. It is up to us to extend this protection and use it wisely to safeguard our investments in gathering and reporting the news.

In addition to the initiatives you've seen today, AP has received approval from the Board this weekend to pursue the development of two critical new components.

To further protect our content and yours, we will develop a rights management and tracking system, focusing on text content. Second, to capture the attention of our audience, we plan to introduce new search pages that will point users to the latest and most authoritative sources of breaking news. We'll have more to say about these exciting projects soon.

We cannot know better than anyone else where the fast-changing news business will take us over the next several years. We believe a few things are very clear.

We must be flexible in offering you licensing opportunities to develop new products. Our pricing must be competitive. We must be paid appropriately for the quality and breadth of the work by licensed users. Our distribution platforms must be robust with cutting-edge links to digital networks, and we must make our content available from anywhere for any medium you choose to use.

In the past year, we shifted resources to business, real estate and economic coverage at the right moment to deliver comprehensive and continuing coverage of the biggest story in a generation.

At the same time, we delivered on another presidential campaign and vote count and found a way to increase coverage of celebrities to feed the growing demand for entertainment news.

In the months ahead, we intend to bring even more intensity to the task of fashioning a news report for you that can play across all channels, basic or premium, ad-supported or fee-based.

Whether itís global news or locally relevant news, AP will be there for you, anticipating as best we can where we need to be and what we need to deliver. Our basic promise to the Cooperative is undiminished by the difficult economic environment.

Above all else, we remain committed to being first with the most reliable news report. To that end, AP and its journalists across the country and around the world remain as excited about the stories and news of today as we have since 1846. Thank you.