When he was a cub reporter in the 1960s Tom Curley estimates the news cycle – defined as the "period of time when all the people interested in a story had access to it" – was 12 hours. Times have changed.
"I would say until about 11 September 2001 it was three hours," says Curley, outgoing president and chief executive of the Associated Press. "Now it's 30 minutes. You might say if you are a certain age – with Twitter and Facebook and all that type of stuff – it's three minutes."
No wonder the BBC is telling its journalists to inform their editors of breaking news before they put it on Twitter. "If we can win by two minutes, on just about every story we can charge a premium," says Curley. "Driving faster and faster is what we are still focused on. That hasn't changed." But much else has altered in the course of Curley's nine years in charge of what claims to be the world's largest news agency.
Credited with modernising AP – he moved it out of its expensive and stuffy Rockefeller Center building to the west side of Manhattan – Curley will also be remembered for going toe-to-toe with Google, a dispute that saw AP stories (briefly) disappear from Google News.
"To get the internet companies to pay fair value, that was challenge No 1, and to some extent it still is," says Curley. Back in 2009 he found himself aligned alongside Rupert Murdoch as Google's critics in chief. Curley said news providers were being exploited by search engines; Murdoch went further, branding the likes of Google and Yahoo "content kleptomaniacs".
AP was back on Google News in 2010 with the signing of a new licensing agreement. Subject to a confidentiality clause, it is understood to be worth a significant eight-figure sum to AP.
The agency came in for criticism when it threatened to sue websites that used its stories without permission, but Curley says the issue of unlicensed content will be a critical one for his successor.
"I think it's worse now than it's ever been," he says. "There are more and more organisations that are being created seemingly each day, getting funded by private equity or hedge funds, to basically free-ride on other people's content.
"We are at a point where we need to step up again and show folk that you just can't run off with the entire wire."
Curley declines to be specific but says AP is "looking very closely at some actions we might have to take very soon in some areas. We have been willing to act and we have won them."
He adds: "We are not trying to shut down the web, we are very clear about that. But we also want to get paid. It costs a lot of money to have a journalist in Afghanistan and make sure they can stay alive and get their video, their stills and their text back to us."
A not-for-profit news co-operative owned by its American print and broadcast members, AP has 3,500 staff in more than 200 cities around the world, including a newly opened bureau in North Korea. This is 15% fewer than when Curley took charge, and his tenure coincided with an enormous contraction in the US newspaper industry.
Revenues of $631m (£401m) in 2010 were 7% down on the previous year, the first time since the Great Depression that sales had fallen for two consecutive years. AP lost $14.7m as it lowered its fees to help newspapers and broadcasters cope with falling advertising revenues.
The contribution from US newspapers has tumbled $80m ("a huge number") and now accounts for just 20% of AP's revenue, compared with nearly twice that a decade ago. Another 50% of its income comes from broadcasting and 25% from newspapers outside of the US.
Curley forecasts no letup for newspapers in the short term. "I am very worried and I think the pace of change accelerates from here as the sophistication of mobile devices intensifies. All those saying the worst has happened and we are at a stable plateau, I don't buy it."
Curley is looking to video, the internet and mobile devices to boost future revenues, as well as better exploitation of its enormous archive. To this end AP will launch a new mobile app offering Twitter-style updates on breaking news.
He explains: "The purpose is to get in step with the social media flow of the news. In the past you would update a story 12 times in a 24-hour cycle. Now it's possible to update it 200 times, and each time you do that on the web it drives traffic."
But social media fans may be disappointed that Curley is not on Twitter, nor Facebook ("I dropped out of Facebook after I got a scathing critique of my page from my daughter").
A former president and publisher of USA Today before joining AP, Curley began his career aged 15 covering high school basketball for his hometown paper in Pennsylvania.
"I played and filed reports," he says. "I was the original conflict of interest." Now 63, he briefly considered a move into academia but is instead "going to jump into my canoe and get lost on some lakes in the Northern Woods".
One of his research papers, had he opted for academia, would have focused on what he perceives to be the failure of financial journalism in covering the economic downturn.
"I don't think we did a good enough job, and we may not be doing as good a job as we should be on the salaries and people who have been basically taken over by the taxpayers and are still managing to pay themselves large sums of money."
Curley says his staff have already felt the "chilling" effect of the fallout from the phone-hacking scandal.
"You always worry that it could bring censorship of one form or another," he says. "We are already seeing my journalists here [in the UK] report the easy information that we used to get from the police has pretty much dried up.
"The laws on hacking and payments are rather clear. We don't need more laws there but somebody didn't enforce what was already there. Why did they not enforce them? What was really going on and how does that get resolved?"
Curley, who will stay on in the job until a successor is appointed, decided to leave because "the time seems right", with a number of major contracts settled and before the big events of 2012 – the London Olympics, the European Football Championships, and the small matter of the US presidential elections.
A keen sports fan with a passion for photography, Curley has been known to join his staff at sporting events, editing photo galleries or helping reporting staff. He filed quotes from the 2004 Athens Olympics. Maybe he will do the same at the London Games. Except this time on a freelance basis.
