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Associated Press

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The Associated Press
Company typeNon-profit cooperative
IndustryNews media
FoundedNew York City, 1846 [1]
HeadquartersNew York City
Area served
Worldwide
Key people
Tom Curley, President and CEO
ProductsWire service
RevenueIncrease $654,186,000 USD 2005 [1]
Increase $17,959,000 USD 2005 [1]
Increase $18,528,000 USD 2005 [1]
Number of employees
3,700
Websiteap.org

The Associated Press, or AP, is an American news agency, and is the world's largest such organization. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, who both contribute stories to it and use material written by its staffers. Many newspapers and broadcasters outside the United States are AP subscribers — that is, they pay a fee to use AP material but are not members of the cooperative.

As of 2005, AP's news is used by 1,700 newspapers, in addition to 5,000 television and radio outlets. Its photo library consists of more than 10 million images. The AP has 243 bureaus and serves 121 countries, with a diverse international staff drawing from all over the world.

As part of their agreements with the Associated Press, most newspapers grant automatic permission for the Associated Press to distribute their local news reports. For example, on page two of every edition of the Washington Post, the masthead includes the announcement, "The Associated Press is entitled exclusively to use for republication 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 newswriting in the United States. The AP has a straightforward, "just-the-facts" writing style, often using the inverted pyramid style of writing so that stories can be edited to fit available space in a newspaper without losing the essence of the story.

The collapse of AP's traditional rival, United Press International, as a major competitor in 1993 has left AP as the only nationally oriented news service based in the United States. The other rival English-language news services, such as Reuters and the English language service of Agence France-Presse, are based outside the United States.

The explosion of media and news outlets with the arrival of the Internet has posed a threat to AP's financial structure. On April 18, 2005, at its annual meeting, AP announced that as of 2006 it would, for the first time, begin charging separate fees for posting articles and pictures online. News outlets that buy AP's news, sports, business and entertainment coverage have previously been allowed to place the material online at no extra cost. The cooperative later backed down from the plan and, in a bid to reach more readers, launched asap, a service aimed at 18–34-year-olds. The service was discontinued in October 2007 [2].

AP's American employees, except for a small group classified as "administrative," are represented by the News Media Guild and the Communication Workers of America.

History

AP was formed in May 1846[2] by a group of newspapers who wanted to pool resources to collect news from Europe. Before this, the newspapers had competed by sending reporters out in rowboats to meet the ships as they arrived in the harbor. The owners of these newspapers realized that they were all paying for essentially the same information, and they decided it would be cheaper to have a service collect and pay for the information once from the telegraph company. Their organization was originally called the Harbor News Association; it was later renamed the Associated Press. The driving force in its formation was Moses Yale Beach, publisher of the New York Sun, when he invited the other New York publishers to join the Sun in a cooperative venture in covering the Mexican-American War. The five New York papers who joined in the agreement were the Sun, the Journal of Commerce, the Courier and Enquirer, the Herald, and the Express. In 1849 the Harbor News Association opened the first bureau outside the U.S., in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to meet ships from Europe before they docked in New York.

  • 1861: Facing censorship in covering the American Civil War, reporters first filed under the anonymous byline "from the Associated Press agent."
  • 1876: Mark Kellogg, a stringer, becomes the first AP correspondent to die in the line of duty, at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. His final dispatch: "I go with Custer and will be at the death."
  • 1893: Melville E. Stone becomes the general manager of the reorganized A.P., a post he retains until 1921. Under his leadership, the A.P. becomes one of the world's most prominent news agencies.
  • 1899: AP uses Guglielmo Marconi's wireless telegraph to cover the America's Cup yacht race off Sandy Hook, New Jersey, the first news test of the new wireless telegraph.
  • 1914: AP introduces the Teletype, which transmitted directly to printers over telegraph wires. Eventually a worldwide network of 60-word-per-minute Teletypes is built up.
  • 1919: Upton Sinclair includes a scathing criticism of the AP in his investigative book on contemporary journalism, The Brass Check.
  • 1935: AP starts WirePhoto, the world's first wire service for photographs. The first photo to transfer over the wires was of a plane crash in Morehouseville, N.Y., on Jan. 1, 1935.
  • 1938: AP shifts into 50 Rockefeller Plaza (known as "50 Rock") in the newly built Rockefeller Center, which would remain its headquarters for 68 years; in 2004 it shifted to expanded offices at 450 W. 33rd St.
  • 1941: AP expands from print into radio.
  • 1945: AP Paris bureau chief Edward Kennedy (no relation to the U.S. Senator) defies an Allied Headquarters news blackout to report Germany’s surrender, touching off a bitter episode that leads to his eventual dismissal by the AP. Kennedy argued that he was reporting what German radio had already broadcast.
  • 1994: AP launches APTV, a global video newsgathering agency, headquartered in London.

AP Sports Polls

The Associated Press Building in New York City. The AP left this building in 2004.

The Associated Press is also known for putting together Associated Press (AP) Polls on numerous college sports in the United States. The AP Poll ranking the top-25 NCAA Division I (FBS and FCS) college football and Division I men's and women's college basketball teams are the most well known. The polls are made by collecting top-25 votes of numerous designated sports journalists and then compiled at the AP office. The AP Poll in college football was particularly notable because it helped determine the ranking of teams at the end of the year for the Bowl Championship Series until the AP, citing conflict of interest, asked for the AP Poll to be removed from the Bowl Championship Series. In the 2005 season, the Harris Interactive College Football Poll took its place in the formula. The AP Poll is the longest serving college football poll, having started in 1936.

Associated Press Television News

In 1994 London based Associated Press Television (APTV) was started to provide agency news material to television news broadcasters. Other providers of such material were Reuters Television and Worldwide Television News (WTN).

In 1998 APTV left the Associated Press building in the City of London and merged with WTN to create Associated Press Television News(APTN) in the existing WTN building in North London.

Current events

Jamil Hussein controversy

Main article: Jamil Hussein controversy

Some Associated Press reporters have been accused by bloggers of using fake sources, in particular a purported police captain Jamil Hussein, for their reporting of sectarian violence in Iraq. The Associated Press stood by its reporting, and on January 4, 2007 the Iraqi Interior Ministry recognized Jamil as an active member of the Baghdad police force, and said he now faces arrest for talking to journalists. Ministry spokesman Abdul-Karim Khalaf, who had previously denied the existence of Hussein, acknowledged that the officer was assigned to the Khadra police station.[3]. Though conceding this, the same bloggers countered that the story that had sparked the hunt - that of the destruction of four mosques, the burning to death of six civilians and the failure to act by Iraqi security forces - had failed to hold up to both Washington Post and The New York Times investigations into the alleged event. The AP stands by the story, though in a subsequent AP article the number of destroyed mosques had been reduced from 'four' to one "badly damaged" structure, and no mention was made of security forces' alleged inaction. [4] [5]

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.com, etc, which all have news pages 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.

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c "Consolidated Financial Statements, The Associated Press and Subsidiaries: Years ended December 31, 2005 and 2004" (PDF). Associated Press. 2006-03-07. Retrieved 2006-10-13. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)]
  2. ^ AP Is Older Than Was Thought, Papers Show, Associated Press, January 31 2006
  3. ^ "Iraq threatens arrest of police officer" AP, 04 January 2007
  4. ^ "Militants Attack Sunnis' Mosques in 2 Iraqi Cities", The New York Times, 25 November 2006
  5. ^ "In Iraq, Reprisals Embolden Militias", The Washington Post, 24 November 2006
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