The Neiman Journalism Lab has a transcript of a speech that Tom Curley, president of The Associated Press, gave in Hong Kong last week.

Here's one takeaway, but read the whole thing:

It’s been said that the big mistake that we made, the orginal sin of the Internet, was to give our content away for free. That is not true. We have to engage. The public is consuming content on the web. We have to be a part of that or we will become irrelevant. That was not the mistake we made.

The mistake we made was not imagining more than one product. We took all the good stuff we created, whether for broadcast or for newspapers or even a couple of magazines that have the good sense never to quote me [laughter], and then took it all and put it on the web without much thought. Oh, the number of links, the lightness or heaviness of the page, how much multimedia. Oh, we went through handwringing sessions over that. We didn’t have enough multimedia. The links were too heavy. Or we had too many pictures, and it wasn’t loading fast enough. We spent endless amounts of time over those issues, and they were largely all irrelevant. What we should have been thinking about is a whole different stream of products. And so we are. And so that’s what you’re going to see evolve over the next few years.

He also talked a bit on AP's rocky relationship with Google. For more on that, see this earlier Nieman post: What The Associated Press is saying to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.