AP chief: ‘breaking news is a premium business’

Don Day December 9th, 2007

Paid Content has a nice quick hit interview with Associated Press editor Tom Curley. He touches on the Google deal (”not affecting anybody”), the way the AP’s structure is changing, the Yahoo consortium and more. Curley says if people want to use AP content, they should pay for it. “This nonsense that you can just take the first paragraph or use the picture small doesn’t really fly with us. People die trying to take those pictures.”

With so much news and content floating around, Curley says breaking news sits at the top of the heap. We believe that breaking news is worth more these days than it ever was. So breaking news is a premium business.”

Curley also broaches the idea of the AP becoming a news aggregator with sharing between members. “The joy is not in searching, the joy is finding the content that you want. Well, we think we can make that much better and also that sets up a lot of possibilities in terms of revenue, especially around behavioral advertising.” Fifty newspapers are currently participating in a trial, and the AP hopes as many as 3,600 orginizations would eventually participate.