AP: The News Gatekeeper is Dead! Long Live The News Gatekeeper!
The CEO of the Associated Press, Tom Curley, gave a speech yesterday to a group of news executives supposedly calling on them to drop their antiquated ways, learn to embrace the new opportunities of the internet and …
Context & Ripple Effects
Tom Curley's confirmed remarks at the Knight-Bagehot Dinner land midway through a 2007 cycle of legacy-news self-flagellation: Techdirt had already mocked a newspaper publisher in May for blaming the internet rather than his own failure to adapt, and Silicon Valley Watcher spent September declaring the press release dead. What makes this round different is who is talking — the chief of the wire service that member papers depend on, not just another publisher.
The irony driving the coverage is that the 'drop your antiquated ways' message (which Techdirt flags as reported rather than verified in full text) comes from an organization still selling bundled content, even as AP builds its own digital plumbing — 100 new radio and TV affiliates joined its Online Video Network by July 2007, running MSN player technology with nationally managed ad sales. The AP posted the full remarks on ap.org itself, while Silicon Alley Insider read the speech chiefly as Curley 'bemoaning' Google and the aggregators.
First-order effects
- Member news executives now face a mandate from their own supplier's CEO: AP's leadership is telling them the bundled-wire model needs an internet strategy, and AP's OVN expansion shows it intends to sell them the replacement infrastructure.
Second-order effects
- Silicon Alley Insider's framing puts aggregators like Google in the crosshairs of the wire services' licensing posture, raising the odds of friction between AP and the platforms that distribute its members' content for free traffic.
- Member publishers have to weigh staying inside AP's bundle — now extended into video players and ad sales — against building direct web audiences, since their gatekeeper is becoming a competitor for the same online revenue.
Third-order effects
- If incumbents keep framing the fight as 'us versus the aggregators' rather than fixing their own distribution, gatekeeping stops being a position anyone owns and becomes contestable — control shifts toward whichever platform handles aggregation, search, or ad routing.
- The pattern of trade-association chiefs exhorting adaptation while member firms resist points toward a decade-long structural squeeze on intermediary news organizations, with regulation or collective licensing likely to emerge as the fallback response.
The trend: News gatekeeping is shifting from owned chokepoints like the wire services to contestable positions held by whoever controls distribution and aggregation online.