A conversation about print journalism in the digital age

A conversation about print journalism in the digital age with Arianna Huffington of Huffingtonpost.com and Tom Curley of the Associated Press


The future of news and how it’s distributed is in great upheaval. The
debate is growing over how to adjust to digital media. On Monday, the
Associated Press announced that it will take legal action against any Web
site that uses articles without permission. The move raises complex
questions about intellectual property and the fair use of content.

Joining me now is the president and CEO of the Associated Press, Tom
Curley, and from Los Angeles, Arianna Huffington. She is the founder and
editor of The Huffington Post. I am pleased to have both of them here to
talk about this very important issue.

First, just for clarification. AP is a legendary name, as UPI was a
legendary name. What is AP today? Give me the history of what happened to
bring you to make this statement that if you want AP, you have got to pay
for it? One small note, Huffington Post wants AP and in fact, they already
pay for it.

TOM CURLEY: They are a licensee, and we’re pleased to have them.

We made some decisions several years ago, and we’ve had one licensing
policy for the web. Clearly, we’re at a different place. The web has
evolved or devolved, depending on your point of view, and what we believe
is people are trying to build businesses on our back, on our good work, and
on the works of our journalists, who are in some cases risking their lives
to get that news. So they are building their business and they are not
compensating us. And that’s what we want to stop.

CHARLIE ROSE: And how do you suggest you stop that?

TOM CURLEY: We need to get control of our content.

CHARLIE ROSE: So what you want to do in your own judgment is restore
the balance of power between the publishers of content and search engines?

TOM CURLEY: That’s right. We want a fair deal.

CHARLIE ROSE: So tell me how you see where we are at this moment and
where it might go.

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Well, first of all, we need to clarify, Charlie,
that Google has a multimillion arrangement with AP in order to carry their
content, and to have it on their server. Huffington Post has an
arrangement with AP whereby we pay for using their content, and so do many
other sites.

The question is, do we recognize, as Jeff Jarvis puts it, that we’re
living in the linked economy, where links are actually incredibly valuable?
They drive traffic to content providers. At The Huffington Post, you know,
half our traffic comes from links and search. So either we’re going to
really acknowledge the brave new world we’re living in, as opposed to
trying to pretend that we’re still living in the old world, where simply
content reigned supreme, then we need to see how do we monetize links. And
many are doing just that.

For example, MSNBC, NBC, Comedy Central, they have embeddable players
when it comes to video, and so they can monetize that. You can put on a
segment of Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show,” and you get multiple other links
taking you to other parts of Comedy Central, and you get ads that can be
monetized.

So the question is, of course you need to monetize your content, as
Tom has been saying, but how do you do it? Do you do it by creating walled
gardens, which is not going to work? It hasn’t worked when “The New York
Times” did it. That’s why they ended Times Select. It’s not going to
work, because consumer habits have changed. Consumers are used to going
around, surfing the Net, finding different links, following them,
searching. You’re not going to change those habits.

CHARLIE ROSE: All right. But this is true too. Bill Keller just
made a speech in the last couple of days in which he suggested that “The
New York Times” as well is looking for a new model. I mean, do you have
sympathy for the Associated Press, and do you believe that there is a way,
some new model that we don’t know yet, that would satisfy all concerned?

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: There are going to be many new models, but I’m
confident that the only new models that will succeed will be those that
embrace the linked economy, that embrace the Internet. Any model that
fights it, any model that tries to create walls is not going to work.

And in fact, I recommend very highly to Tom and anybody else trying to
make this work to read a book by Clayton Christensen called “The
Innovator’s Dilemma.” How do you deal with disruptive innovation? The
Internet, let’s face it, is disruptive innovation. If you try to pretend
that you can go back to the old world, it’s not going to work. If you try
to just put your finger in the dike and stop what’s happening from
happening, you’re going to lose precious time, as many newspaper providers
have lost, instead of learning to ride the rapids and actually provide new
ways to reach the consumer.

TOM CURLEY: There’s a theory out there that all we have to do is make
our stuff available, and there will be enough traffic, there will be enough
audience, and we’ll get proper compensation for that.

CHARLIE ROSE: And that was true in part up until 2008, when there was
a lot of advertising dollars going towards the Internet.

TOM CURLEY: Only true in part. I think most of us knew that free was
never a business model that could really make it. The Internet experience
for most has been a bomb. Unlimited competition, unlimited inventory, a
bad customer experience, very difficult to hold a brand. Arianna’s
HuffIngton Post has been one of the few that has really managed to get a
brand buzz and build content.

We enjoy working with her. We enjoy the license that we have, and
she’s a good example of what we’d like to have -- somebody who takes our
content, uses it in a licensed way, and then blogs about it in a certain
way to build an audience. What we’re talking about is those that take it
and don’t pay for it and try to build a different business.

CHARLIE ROSE: Is your primary concern Google? And the fact that
Google, under fair use, takes clips, and therefore people can access the
clips without necessarily linking to you, because they don’t want to see
the rest of the story?

TOM CURLEY: You know, Google is out there, and everybody is trying to
make it into an AP-Google, and AP trying to out-Google Google. I assure
you that’s not where we want to go. Google is a licensed user of AP. But
it’s what happens to it in the web that goes beyond that license that we
need to pull back, and that’s what we’re working on.

CHARLIE ROSE: Just to make sure I have this, what is AP going to do?
What are you going to create?

TOM CURLEY: There are a couple of things that we want to do. Number
one is we want to create what we call landing pages, but the news map that
takes people to the authoritative source who broke the news. Another thing
that we want to do is a content registry. Take people to the sources of
information and protect the content as it goes through the Internet. Put a
beacon on it, watch where it goes, and police it better than we have.

CHARLIE ROSE: Do you think this will work or not work, Arianna?

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Well, first of all, everybody is trying to invent
the new rules of the road. And I think experimentation is absolutely
great. For me, there’s one simple rule, which is are you trying to build
walls around your content, or are you honoring and celebrating the linked
economy? Because if you try to do the former, then it’s not going to work.
You know, a great Greek philosopher Heraclitus said you cannot step into
the same river twice. So the old river of content providers being supreme
and links meaning nothing cannot be recreated.

CHARLIE ROSE: Do you believe that the AP, in terms of what they have
announced, are trying to put a wall around the AP, or B, refusing to
acknowledge the new digital linked economy?

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: You see traditional newspapers moving to the web,
and doing incredible work there, like “The Washington Post,” like “The New
York Times.” They have great content that originates on the web, great
blogs, and we all link to them. We get hundreds of requests every day for
links, because links are powerful. Links can be monetized, and
increasingly, we see that content providers are not just looking to get
consumers to their sites. They’re looking to get their content wherever
consumers are. That’s kind of new promiscuity, if you want. It’s what can
be monetized. And YouTube is doing it and Facebook is doing it. And that,
I think, is going to be the future.

TOM CURLEY: Charlie, this also has to dovetail with some efforts to
get paid differently. What started as a conversation last fall has turned
into a loud roar. We need to get better compensation. We, the industry,
need to get paid differently. The advertising is not going to be there.

So at AP, we’re looking at a couple of things. One is to take our
content and divide it into three broad buckets -- headlines, that first
paragraph that has the who, what, where, when, why, how. And then free --
what we call free the -- everything else that might make the story, how you
would present it in full forum.

We can imagine restricting the number of headlines, restricting the
number of first paragraphs that get out there. We can imagine keeping a
lot of photos back, and we can imagine keeping the full text back. So
there are different business models that we’ll all be experimenting with,
and that’s an approach that we’ve been looking at.

We’ve heard from every major media company except one, that they are
in support of it. So the second thing was to build consensus around these
types of steps.

So I think we’re in a very good spot to continue the conversation and
to imagine different products.

Everybody out there in media, the people who are doing the original
work, has to look at new sources of revenue and how to get it.

CHARLIE ROSE: And you accept that, Arianna?

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Charlie, there has been a perfect storm of the
new technology, Craigslist and all that has happened in the last 15 years,
coming together with the economic crisis that has had such dire impact on
advertising. So, obviously, I mean, we read every day headlines about
what’s happening to newspapers, including today “The Boston Globe.”

So there’s no question that everybody needs to be thinking of
innovative ways to deal with the future. All I’m arguing for is to be very
careful not to pretend that consumer habits have not changed, and not to be
looking to get consumers going to a particular source of news, because
they’re not going to do that. They’re used to going everywhere.

CHARLIE ROSE: She has not said anything to you, I guess, that you
didn’t think about long and hard before you made this announcement.

TOM CURLEY: Well, that’s correct. People have looked at this and
have lived with it for 15 years. And I mean, everyone has decided it’s
time to go in a different direction. The one major point to keep in mind
is that the market for news is growing.

CHARLIE ROSE: That’s exactly the reality you have to face, it’s how
people are seeking out the news that they want, and how they are using a
digital revolution defined in a different way. And if in fact you change
that, what has become to them free, you are risking something that may very
well be your own downfall, making you, as she just suggested, Detroit.

TOM CURLEY: ESPN has done a very good job at figuring out how to get
premium payment and how to put some other content out there to drive
traffic. People are talking in terms of all or none. That’s not the way
we see it. We see some headlines out there. We see some stories out
there, but we don’t see everything out there.

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: I think it’s very important to recognize the new
realities in terms of consumer habits, in terms of what technology makes
possible, and look at some of the success models. Look at the embeddable
players, for example. I think that’s a great model for the future, because
instead of what was happening even a few months ago, of trying to get all
the traffic to say “Saturday Night Live” itself, now with this embeddable
NBC player, the traffic can go wherever the consumer is. But NBC monetizes
that through advertising, through other links to other content that they
are providing.

TOM CURLEY: There’s a disconnect. I appreciate what she’s saying,
and we know where the market is going. We’ve launched a whole lot of new
products. We have a mobile news network that’s been out there for a year.
We have 1,100 newspapers participating. You can get up-to-the-minute news.
You know, we have the world’s largest video news service. We have the best
technology platform in media out there that can link and participate in
this environment. So we’ve studied it carefully. It’s a matter of pulling
it together in a way that we get paid for our hard work.

CHARLIE ROSE: You want to be your own aggregator, too.

TOM CURLEY: We just are business-to-business. We don’t see ourselves
going directly to the consumer, but we can create landing pages or the news
map that our partners in media can put their content on.

CHARLIE ROSE: What’s out there that you think is showing viability?

TOM CURLEY: I’m not sure micro payments will work. I think you need
some business operation that is a collector. The cable model is one that
keeps coming back. We see that happening with mobile sooner. But I think
you can imagine premium types of content where people do pay directly.
That would be more limited applications, probably 1 or 2 percent here or 5
or 6 percent there. But you can restrict your content in how it’s used and
make sure that more of it comes back to your site originally if you put
some out and bring some back. So I think that’s the simplest and the one
that will go further fastest.

CHARLIE ROSE: We are, Arianna, to sum this up, in a moment of change.
People -- notwithstanding all of the historical flow that is so clear and
that you represent, there is, it seems to me, within the conversation a
sense that this is a moment to look for all of the future models that might
be possible, and the kind of questions that Tom has asked with respect to
AP; Rupert Murdoch is asking clearly, making strong statements about “The
Wall Street Journal”; Bill Keller and Arthur Sulzberger are asking about
“The New York Times” -- this is a moment, is it not?

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: The point is that a lot of these ideas are really
not celebrating and fully accepting the present, which is going to be an
essential part of the future. We are not going to go back to the past.
And that’s my only concern about any model that ignores the reality of how
people consume news. Through links, through search, through going to the
communities they love and that resonate with them.

And also, we cannot ignore citizen journalists. Increasingly, we have
many news broken through Twitter and through basically citizens,
individuals who happen to be where the plane lands on the Hudson, or during
the terrible time in Mumbai.

CHARLIE ROSE: But that’s just adding value. That is not the change
in the model. It seems to me that you’re saying we have seen the future
and it is here. It is a linked economy, it is search engines, it is online
advertising. That’s where the future is, and if you can’t find your way to
that, then you can’t find your way.

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: I -- you said it perfectly. That’s exactly what
I believe, and that’s exactly what gives all of us an enormous amount of
room to maneuver. There are many, many different models within this
future. There are many ways to experiment, and we all should be
experimenting. The rules of the road are being worked out. But the one
thing we cannot do is go back to the past, and anybody who tries to do
that, I predict, will fail.

CHARLIE ROSE: Well, Tom would say to you -- and I’ll give him the
chance to say it -- he is not trying to go back to the past. He’s trying
to find a link to the future.

TOM CURLEY: The question that I would ask is who’s going to pay to
ask the tough questions of government? Who’s going to pay to get the
lawyers to help file those Freedom of Information requests? Who’s going to
pay for the security in Iraq or Afghanistan? And who’s going to put that
infrastructure in place to get that news back in a few seconds from
wherever it breaks in the world? That’s what this is about. Not putting
up toll booths, not becoming a plumber. This is about a new world, where,
yes, we’re willing to link, we’re willing to have the content go in
different directions, if there’s a compensation model attached to it. And
that’s the point of change that we’ve reached.

This is about a fair deal. And it’s time that it came back to the
people who are doing the work.

CHARLIE ROSE: Arianna, who’s going to pay?

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Well, absolutely. These are really the models
that we’re working our. On investigative journalism, for example, we’re
experimenting with a for-profit/not-for-profit model. Because after all,
investigative journalism is a public good, and I believe there are going to
be increasingly foundations that are going to be paying for it, because
just think of it...

CHARLIE ROSE: I thank you very much, Arianna Huffington. Great to
see you, as always.

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Thank you.

CHARLIE ROSE: Tom Curley, AP, thank you too.