Online News Association Conference Keynote Address, November 12th, 2004

"It’s important because one of the captains of the news industry, the CEO of the AP, was grappling with the enormous disruptions brought by the digital tools that have re-made his industry. He takes note of the power shift. He recognises that with push-button distribution via the Internet, journalistic routines that were a reflection of the old distribution model have less value. He says that journalistic work has to change because the value we add isn’t in the same place anymore. And this is coming from the centre of the news system, the boss of the AP, the baseline for all news reporting. He says, “The users now decide.” Yes, another important thing about this speech is that Curley points out how the news industry tried to preserve the business it knew from before. For example, by re-purposing content from the print platform and putting it online. Which allowed it to avoid, for a time, the consequences of these disruptive shifts. The shift happened in late 2004, early 2005. That’s when the people running large news organisations finally realised that digital is the future and it’s way different than the business we knew. Has everyone faced up to that now? No. There are plenty of holdouts. Many of the journalists who see paywalls as The Answer, or who think that if the business had simply avoided the original sin of putting its stuff online for free, then none of this would be happening. David Simon, creator of The Wire and a former journalist for The Baltimore Sun , has been proclaiming this very loudly. But he is merely speaking for a cadre of his former colleagues."