AP's Curley speaks, Blodget explains

I was going to do a detailed post about AP CEO Tom Curley's speech last night at the Knight-Bagehot dinner.

But the definition of foolishness is to duplicate what someone else has done -- and probably done better than you could have. So head to Silicon Alley Insider and Henry Blodgett's deconstructed (in more polite terms, annotated) version of Curley's speech.

I did find this glancing reference high in the speech to be fascinating (Curley is talking about the news habits of a young Indian man):

Madi’s story was captured by anthropologists hired by AP to study news consumption patterns of young adults. Madiwas by far the biggest news junkie of the bunch, but he was not unique.

AP could do the industry, and academia, a heck of a service by allowing -- no, encouraging -- those anthropologists to publish their work and then linking to it. Maybe it will; I don't know, given AP's reputation for not being the most forthcoming of corporate PR operations. I don't see anything on AP's PR site mentioning it. (Note to world's largest news service: How cool would it be, and how much would it help your street cred, to have an RSS feed and search capability on that page?)

Despite all of Curley's good words, of course, he still has to deal with a board dominated by "old" media, and more than a few "old" media aren't necessarily thrilled by AP's initiatives. As several have written me after recent posts: What do you do when your supplier becomes your competitor? (Wrong question, of course. The right one is: How do we take advantage of all the inputs the digital age has opened to us so that we don't depend on AP for the same news as the folks running the newspaper/TV station/Web site the next town over?)

So what's next?

Don't be surprised if, before Curley leaves the building on 10th Avenue, that he moves to try to loosen that yoke. Wait for it ...