Adapt or perish, AP CEO warns peers

The AP reports that Tom Curley, CEO of The Associated Press, called on news executives Thursday to "stop pining" for the past and adapt to the new ways that news is being distributed and consumed.

Curley said in a speech that news organizations should quit thinking like gatekeepers of information and reach out to people who are accustomed to receiving news in real time online and customizing the ways they see and read it.

"Editors need to stop pining for the old world and intensify the leading to the new one," Curley told a fundraising dinner for the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship, a program at Columbia University for business journalists.

At the same time, Curley said news organizations were partly to blame for the troubles they are experiencing in adapting to the new realities of the news business being wrought by the explosion of Internet use.

"The first thing that has to go is the attitude," Curley said. "Our institutional arrogance has done more to harm us than any portal."

This phenomenon is well-documented within the industry. For a recent assignment, I interviewed media consultants and former newspaper editors who spoke of the change-resistant culture in these organizations. In fact, the Readership Institute found that the culture and management practices of ninety newspapers are change-averse.

This quote sums it up nicely:

“They know they have to do something, but they don’t know what they must do. Most of them are in their 50s, who consider technology a nuisance -- they viewed it as a mosquito,” said Alan Mutter, the chief executive officer of a consultancy and former No. 2 editor at the San Francisco Chronicle. “But it’s not a mosquito, it’s a grizzly bear.”