By Sarah Colombo — University of Southern California

Associated Press President and CEO Tom Curley welcomed the 2004 Online News Association conference attendees with a keynote address that stressed the importance of news aggregators and community interaction. He called the shift "Web 2.0," describing the next phase as a network where users and machines are "always on."

• Full text of Curley's speech

The value of news content will outweigh the broadcast, print and even online "containers," that the industry produced during the first phase of the new media revolution.

"That's a big shift for old media to come to grips with," he said. "Killer (applications), such as search, RSS and video-capture software such as TiVo -- to name just a few -- have begun to unlock the content from any vessel we try to put it in."

"The franchise is not the newspaper; it's not the broadcast; it's not even the Web site," Curley said. "The franchise is the content itself."

The media's business franchise will be based on content because users can now control when and how their news is delivered. Competition for "eyeballs" is fierce, and the industry has yet to understand all its implications -- "...like how to free our content from those expensive containers we've created -- the newspaper, the broadcast and the Web site -- and tagging our news for delivery in discrete places, on demand. And keeping control of our intellectual property."

The revolution will also force the industry to relinquish its authority as a lecturer and make way for more community interaction.

"As we've seen so clearly in the last year or so, consumers will want to use the two-way nature of the Internet to become active participants themselves in the exchange of news and ideas," he said. "The news, as 'lecture,' is giving way to news as a conversation."

But branding and journalistic quality and need not be compromised, Curley said.

"Established brands in the news business will continue to be extremely important, even as new voices enter the conversation."

The continuing "need for facts" was especially evident during the recent presidential election. Despite the competitive effort made by bloggers, Curley said, AP political correspondent Ron Fournier got the scoop last week that Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry had conceded.

Curley acknowledged the undeniable force of blogging in the news media.

"There are 4 million bloggers out there on the Internet, making 400,000 posts per day," he said. "That works out to roughly 16,000 posts per hour, or about as many stories as the AP sends out in an entire day."

And, increasingly, blogs are competing for advertising dollars. Citing data from Technorati.com, Curley noted that just 16 of the top 100 blogs are ad-free.

Curley also recognized ONA as a pioneer in the media revolution. "Online journalism has arrived, and, fortunately, ONA was already there to greet it," he said. "You now lead us into the next phase."