The
Associated Press (
AP) is an
American news agency. The AP is a
cooperative owned by its contributing
newspapers,
radio and
television stations in the
United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists. Many newspapers and broadcasters outside the United States are AP
subscribers, paying a fee to use AP material without being contributing members of the cooperative.
, the news collected by the AP is published and republished by more than 1,700 newspapers, in addition to more than 5,000 television and radio
broadcasters. The
photograph library of the AP consists of over 10 million images. The Associated Press operates 243
news bureaus, and it serves at least 120 countries, with an international staff located all over the world.
Associated Press also operates The Associated Press Radio Network, which provides newscasts twice hourly for broadcast and satellite radio and television stations. The AP Radio also offers news and public affairs features, feeds of news sound bites, and long form coverage of major events.
As part of their cooperative agreement with The Associated Press, most member news organizations grant automatic permission for the AP to distribute their
local news reports. For example, on page two of every edition of
The Washington Post, the newspaper's
masthead includes the statement, "
The Associated Press is entitled exclusively to use for re-publication of all news dispatches credited to it or not otherwise credited in this paper and all local news of spontaneous origin published herein."
The AP Stylebook has become the
de facto standard for news writing in the United States and Canada. The AP employs the
"inverted pyramid formula" for writing that enables the news outlets to edit a story to fit its available publication area without losing the story's essential meaning and news information.
The economic demise of the long-time rival of the Associated Press,
United Press International, as a major American competitor in 1993 left the AP as the only nationally-oriented news service based in the United States. Other
English-language news services, such as
Reuters and the English language service of
Agence France-Presse, are based outside the United States.
History
The Associated Press Building in
New York City. (The AP moved from this building in 2004.)
Current AP headquarters at 450 West 33rd Street
The Associated Press has its roots in a May 1846 agreement between five New York City newspapers to share incoming reports from the
Mexican-American War.
Moses Yale Beach,
publisher of the
New York Sun and a driving force in the organization's formation, invited other New York publishers to join the Sun in a cooperative venture to have news arrive more quickly from the fighting in the
southwestern United States. Dispatches were relayed by boat to
Mobile, Alabama, by
pony express to
Montgomery, Alabama, by
stagecoach to
Richmond, Virginia, and finally by
telegraph to New York City a day or so earlier than commonly-used mail service.
Four other papers agreed to join the
The Sun venture:
The Journal of Commerce,
New York Herald, the
Courier and Enquirer, the
New York Evening Express. As a network of telegraph lines extended out from the City, cooperation grew in sharing
wire reports.
In May 1848, a group of New York City publishers met at the offices of The Sun.
The same five papers form the Harbor News Association to operate a small fleet of
newsboats to get news from arriving ships. The
Naushon (or Newsboy) steamship would meet international traffic at
Sandy Hook. While the earlier agreements had been mainly sharing of information, the Harbor News was the first attempt at building a shared news gathering organization, with ships and staff and a legal framework. Early the following year, on January 11th, 1849, the Harbor News Association was re-chartered to include the
New York Tribune and a more formal framework for cooperation.
In 1850 the
Philadelphia Public Ledger and
Baltimore Sun paid to receive the news without joining the consortium. In the following years more clients and a seventh New York newspaper joined the consortium. In order to keep telegraph costs to a minimum, it sent the stories to regional locations which were then responsible for distributing it among themselves This led to the rise of regional press groups the Western Associated Press (WAP) in the Midwest, Northwestern Associated Press, the New England Associated Press, the Philadelphia Associated Press, and the New York State Associated Press.
Several press associations attempted to break the near monopoly in the 1860s and 1870s until the
United Press started in 1882. In 1891 it was revealed that UPI was getting AP news for free causing a rift among the subset groups and most defected to the UPI. AP responded by striking a monopoly deal with
Reuters in England,
Havas in France and
Wolff in Germany. Most of the papers returned to the AP.
In 1898 the AP discovered that
Chicago Inter Ocean was using news from a wire set up by then rival New York Sun publisher William M. Laffan. AP refused service to the Inter Ocean and the paper filed suit with the
Illinois Supreme Court which ruled that the AP was similar to a
public utility and could not refuse service.
The Associated Press of Illinois then dissolved and set up shop under New York law in 1900 as a non-profit membership organization.
The Associated Press began diversifying its news gathering capabilities, and by 2007 AP was generating only about 30% of its revenue from United States newspapers. 37% came from the global broadcast customers, 15% from online ventures, and 18% came from international newspapers and from photography.
Key dates
- 1893: Melville E. Stone becomes the general manager of the reorganized AP, a post he holds until 1921. Under his leadership, the AP grows to be one of the world's most prominent news agencies.
- 1914: AP introduces the Teletype, which transmitted directly to printers over telegraph wires. Eventually a worldwide network of 60-word-per-minute Teletype machines is built.
- 1938: AP expands to new offices at 50 Rockefeller Plaza (known as "50 Rock") in the newly built Rockefeller Center in New York City, which would remain its headquarters for 66 years.
- 1941: AP expands from print to radio broadcast news.
- 1945: AP Paris bureau chief Edward Kennedy defies an Allied headquarters news blackout to report Nazi Germany’s surrender, touching off a bitter episode that leads to his eventual dismissal by the AP. Kennedy maintains that he reported only what German radio already had broadcast.
- 1994: AP launches APTV, a global video news gathering agency, headquartered in London.
- 2004: The AP moves its headquarters from 50 Rock to 450 W. 33rd Street, New York City.
AP sports polls
The AP is known for its Associated Press polls on numerous
college sports in the
United States. The AP polls ranking the top 25
NCAA Division I (
Football Bowl Subdivision and
Football Championship Subdivision)
college football and NCAA Division I men's and women's
college basketball teams are the most well known. The AP composes the polls by collecting and compiling the top-25 votes of numerous designated sports journalists. The AP poll of
college football was particularly notable for many years because it helped determine the ranking of teams at the end of the regular season for the collegiate
Bowl Championship Series until the AP, citing conflict of interest, asked for the poll to be removed from the bowl series. Beginning in the 2005 season, the
Harris Interactive College Football Poll took the AP's place in the bowl series formula. The AP poll is the longest serving national poll in college football, having begun in 1936.
AP sports awards
Every year on March 31, the AP releases the names of the winners of its
AP College Basketball Player of the Year and
AP College Basketball Coach of the Year awards.
In 1959, the AP began its AP Manager of the Year Award, for major-league baseball. The award was discontinued in 2001.
Associated Press Television News
The APTN Building in London
In 1994, London-based Associated Press Television (APTV) was founded to provide agency news material to television broadcasters. Other existing providers of such material at the time were
Reuters Television and
Worldwide Television News (WTN).
In 1998, AP purchased WTN, and APTV left the Associated Press building in the
Central London and merged with WTN to create
Associated Press Television News (APTN) in the WTN building, now the APTN building in Camden Town.
Controversies
Christopher Newton
The Associated Press fired
Washington, D.C., bureau reporter Christopher Newton in September 2002, accusing him of fabricating at least 40 people and organizations since 2000. Some of the nonexistent agencies quoted in his stories included "Education Alliance," the "Institute for Crime and Punishment in Chicago," "Voice for the Disabled" and "People for Civil Rights."
Fair use controversies
In June 2008, the AP sent numerous
DMCA take down demands and threatened legal action against several
blogs. The AP contended that the internet blogs were violating AP's
copyright by linking to AP material and using headlines and short summaries in those links. Many bloggers and experts noted that the use of the AP news fell squarely under commonly accepted internet practices and within
fair use standards. Others noted and demonstrated that AP routinely takes similar excerpts from other sources, often without attribution or licenses. AP responded that it was defining standards regarding citations of AP news.
Shepard Fairey
In March 2009, the Associated Press countersued artist
Shepard Fairey over
his famous image of Barack Obama, saying the uncredited, uncompensated use of an AP photo violated copyright laws and signalled a threat to journalism. Fairey had sued the Associated Press the previous month over his artwork, titled "Obama Hope" and "Obama Progress," arguing that he didn't violate copyright law because he dramatically changed the image. The artwork, based on an April 2006 picture taken for the AP by Mannie Garcia, was a popular image during the presidential campaign and now hangs in the
National Portrait Gallery in Washington. According to the AP lawsuit filed in federal court in Manhattan, Fairey knowingly "misappropriated The AP's rights in that image." The suit, which also names Fairey's companies, asks the court to award AP profits made off the image and damages. "While (Fairey and the companies) have attempted to cloak their actions in the guise of politics and art, there is no doubt that they are profiting handsomely from their misappropriation," the lawsuit says. Fairey said he looked forward to "upholding the free expression rights at stake here" and disproving the AP's accusations.
Hot News
In January 2008, the Associated Press sued
All Headline News (AHN) claiming that AHN infringed on its copyrights and a 'quasi-property' right to facts. The AP lawsuit alleged that competitor AHN copied the AP’s headlines and news without permission and without paying a syndication fee. After AHN moved to dismiss all but the copyright claims brought by AP, a portion of the lawsuit was dismissed. According to court documents. the case has been dismissed and the AP and AHN have settled the lawsuit.
Governance
The Associated Press is governed by an elected
board of directors.
Web resource
The AP's multi-topic structure has lent itself well to web portals, such as
Yahoo!,
MSN and so forth all have news sites which constantly need to be updated. Often, such portals will rely on AP and other news services as their first source for news coverage of breaking news items. Yahoo's "Top News" page gives the AP top visibility out of any news outlet. This has been of major impact to the AP's public image and role, as it gives new credence to the AP's continual mission of having staff for covering every area of news fully and promptly. The AP is also the news service used on the
Nintendo Wii's
News Channel. In 2007 Google announced it was paying for Associated Press content displayed in
Google News, but the articles are not permanently archived.
