At first, the Internet was not seen as a substitute for traditional news sources. Newspapers and broadcasters still felt an obligation to provide a full menu of news. “When I first got here in 1988, there was certainly much more of a sense of responsibility that [we] needed to cover the world,” Thames recalls. “I would say that right up until recently… the Observer still saw itself as responsible for a comprehensive world and national report. AP could provide that.” September 11, 2001, changed that. As Thames remembers it, “9/11 was one of those moments.”

There was, all of a sudden, this understanding that we weren’t the sole source of information and that this was very different from what it might have been 10 years before. The Internet emerged as a viable source of information, and people began to realize that they could see and hear a lot of their world and national news in real time.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the Internet gradually transformed into a mainstream news and information vehicle. Search engines and aggregators such as Google and Yahoo! matured into powerful online search hubs that influenced how information was accessed, organized, and distributed. Meanwhile, web-based businesses such as Craigslist and eBay.com opened ecommerce channels that gutted revenues, primarily classifieds, long controlled by newspapers. News moved steadily from print to online. Readers benefited from global news sources, most of them free. Newspapers suffered as ads and subscriptions went into steep decline. As newspapers struggled, so did their creation—the AP.

AP Changes. In March 2003, Louis Boccardi, who had led the AP for 18 years, stepped down, handing the reins to Tom Curley as the cooperative’s 12 ^th CEO. Boccardi heralded Curley as having “the deep knowledge of the news industry to keep AP strong.” [1] Curley—who among other achievements had helped launched USA Today —had ambitious plans to modernize the AP’s technology and revamp its business model for the digital era. He had good reason: whereas in the mid-1980s newspapers accounted for more than 50 percent of AP’s revenue, by the 2000s that had declined to 20 percent. While this represented one of the wire’s largest revenue sources, the AP nonetheless was losing money on its services to newspapers and had to find ways to make up the shortfall. [2] In a 2007 keynote address at a Knight-Bagehot program dinner, Curley admonished the newspaper industry for allowing Internet portals to “run off with our best stuff, and we’re afraid or unable to make or enforce deals that drive fair value. The first thing that has to go is the attitude, our institutional arrogance.” [3]