Associated Press

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History

The Associated Press was formed in May 1846 by five daily newspapers in New York City to share the cost of transmitting news of the Mexican–American War. The venture was organized by Moses Yale Beach (1800–68), second publisher of The Sun, joined by the New York Herald, the New York Courier and Enquirer, The Journal of Commerce, and the New York Evening Express. Some historians believe that the New-York Tribune joined at this time; documents show it was a member in 1849. The New York Times became a member in September 1851.

Initially known as the New York Associated Press (NYAP), the organization faced competition from the Western Associated Press (1862), which criticized its monopolistic news gathering and price setting practices. An investigation completed in 1892 by Victor Lawson, editor and publisher of the Chicago Daily News, revealed that several principals of the NYAP entered into a secret agreement with United Press, a rival organization, to share NYAP news and the profits of reselling it. The findings led to the dissolving of the NYAP. That December, the Western Associated Press was incorporated in Illinois as the Associated Press. A 1900 Illinois Supreme Court decision (Inter Ocean Publishing Co. v. Associated Press) holding that the AP was a public utility and operating in restraint of trade resulted in the AP's move from Chicago to New York City, where corporation laws were more favorable to cooperatives.

Chicago Daily News founder Melville Stone served as AP general manager from 1893 to 1921. The AP adopted teletype for its New York service in 1914. The cooperative grew rapidly under the leadership of Kent Cooper, who served from 1925 to 1948 and who built up bureau staff in South America, Europe and (after World War II), the Middle East. Under Kent Cooper, the AP became a more prevalent member of a press agency cartel made up of Reuters and Havas (now Agence France-Presse). He lobbied for the renegotiation of the tripartite contract binding the agencies and their respective news markets at the League of Nations in 1927, attempting to give the AP a more important place in competition with Reuters. The first female AP member, Zell Hart Deming, joined the AP in 1928.

In 1935, the AP launched the Wirephoto network, which allowed transmission of news photographs over leased private telephone lines on the day they were taken. This gave the AP a major advantage over other news media outlets. While the first network was only between New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, eventually the AP had its network across the whole United States.

In 1945, the Supreme Court of the United States held in Associated Press v. United States that the AP had been violating the Sherman Antitrust Act by prohibiting member newspapers from selling or providing news to nonmember organizations as well as making it very difficult for nonmember newspapers to join the AP.

The AP entered the broadcast field in 1941 when it began distributing news to radio stations; it created its own radio network in 1974. In 1994, it established APTV, a global video newsgathering agency. APTV merged with Worldwide Television News in 1998 to form APTN, which provides video to international broadcasters and websites. In 2004, the AP moved its headquarters from its long-time home at 50 Rockefeller Plaza to 450 West 33rd Street in Manhattan. In 2019, AP had more than 240 bureaus globally. Its mission has not changed since its founding, but digital technology has made the distribution of the AP news report an interactive endeavor between the AP and its hundreds of U.S. newspaper members, as well as broadcasters, international subscribers, and online customers.

The AP began diversifying its news gathering capabilities. By 2007, the AP was generating about 30% of its revenue from United States newspapers; by 2024, this had declined to 10%. In 2007, 37% came from the global broadcast customers, 15% from online ventures and 18% came from international newspapers and from photography.

In March 2024, Gannett, the largest U.S. newspaper publisher as measured by total daily circulation, announced that effective March 25, 2024, it would no longer use content from the AP. A spokesperson for AP said that they were "shocked and disappointed" by this development. Newspaper chain McClatchy announced that it would also stop using some AP services. Gannett and McClatchy will both continue to use AP's election results data.

Timeline

1849: The Harbor News Association opened the first news bureau outside the United States in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to meet ships sailing from Europe before they reached dock in New York.

1876: Mark Kellogg, a stringer, was the first AP news correspondent to be killed while reporting the news, at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

1893: Melville E. Stone became the general manager of the reorganized the AP, a post he held until 1921. Under his leadership, the AP grew to be one of the world's most prominent news agencies.

1899: The AP used 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 technology.

1914: The AP introduced the teleprinter, which transmitted directly to printers over telegraph wires. Eventually a worldwide network of 60-word-per-minute teleprinter machines is built.

1935: The AP initiated WirePhoto, the world's first wire service for photographs. The first photograph to transfer over the network depicted an airplane crash in Morehouse, New York, on New Year's Day, 1935.

1938: The AP expanded new offices at 50 Rockefeller Plaza (known as "50 Rock") under an agreement made as part of the construction of Rockefeller Center in New York City. The building would remain its headquarters for 66 years.

1941: The AP expanded from print to radio broadcast news.

1941: Wide World News Photo Service purchased from The New York Times.

1943: The AP sends Ruth Cowan Nash to cover the deployment of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps to Algeria. Nash is the first American woman war correspondent.

1945: AP war correspondent Joseph Morton was executed along with nine OSS men and four British SOE agents by the Germans at Mauthausen concentration camp. Morton was the only Allied correspondent to be executed by the Axis during World War II. That same year, AP Paris bureau chief Edward Kennedy defied an Allied headquarters news blackout to report Nazi Germany's surrender, touching off a bitter episode that led to his eventual dismissal by the AP. Kennedy maintains that he reported only what German radio already had broadcast.

1951: AP Prague bureau chief William N. Oatis was convicted of espionage by the Communist government of Czechoslovakia. He was released in 1953 after his sentence was reduced by 10 years.

1974: The AP launches the Associated Press Radio Network headquartered in Washington, D.C.

1987: The AP switches to color photography completely after the public suicide of American politician R. Budd Dwyer.

1994: The AP launches APTV, a global video news gathering agency, headquartered in London.

2004: The AP moves its headquarters from 50 Rock to 450 West 33rd Street, New York City.

2006: The AP joins YouTube.

2008: The AP launched AP Mobile (initially known as the AP Mobile News Network), a multimedia news portal that gives users news they can choose and provides anytime access to international, national and local news. The AP was the first to debut a dedicated iPhone application in June 2008 on stage at Apple's WWDC event. The app offered AP's own worldwide coverage of breaking news, sports, entertainment, politics and business as well as content from more than 1,000 AP members and third-party sources.

2010: AP earnings fall 65% from 2008 to just $8.8 million. The AP also announced that it would have posted a loss of $4.4 million had it not liquidated its German-language news service for $13.2 million.

2011: AP revenue dropped $14.7 million in 2010. 2010 revenue totaled $631 million, a decline of 7% from the previous year. The AP rolled out price cuts designed to help newspapers and broadcasters cope with declining revenue.

2012: The AP opens its Pyongyang bureau.

2012: Gary B. Pruitt succeeded Tom Curley to become president and CEO. Pruitt is the 13th leader of the AP in its 166-year history.

2016: The AP reported that income dropped to $1.6 million from $183.6 million in 2015. The 2015 profit figure was bolstered by a one-time, $165 million tax benefit.

2017: The AP moved its headquarters to 200 Liberty Street, New York City.

2018: The AP unveiled AP Votecast to replace exit polls for the 2018 US midterm elections.

Israeli–Palestinian conflict

In his book Broken Spring: An American-Israeli Reporter's Close-up View of How Egyptians Lost Their Struggle for Freedom, former AP correspondent, Mark Lavie, who is an American-Israeli Orthodox Jew, claimed that the editorial line of the Cairo bureau was that the conflict was Israel's fault and the Arabs and Palestinians were blameless. Israeli journalist Matti Friedman accused the AP of killing a story he wrote about the "war of words", "between Israel and its critics in human rights organizations", in the aftermath of the 2008–2009 Gaza war.

On September 29, 2000, the first day of the Second Intifada, the AP published a photograph of a badly-bloodied young man behind whom a police officer could be seen with a baton raised in a menacing fashion; a gas station with Hebrew lettering could also be seen in the background. The AP labelled it with the caption "An Israeli policeman and a Palestinian on the Temple Mount", and the picture and caption were subsequently published in several major American newspapers, including the New York Times. In reality, the injured man in the photograph was a Jewish yeshiva student from Chicago named Tuvia Grossman, and the police officer, a Druze named Gidon Tzefadi, was protecting Grossman from a Palestinian mob who had clubbed, stoned, and stabbed Grossman. There are also no gas stations with Hebrew lettering on the Temple Mount.

The episode is often cited by those who accuse the media of having an anti-Israel bias, and was the impetus for the founding of the pro-Israel group HonestReporting. After a letter from Grossman's father noted the error, the AP, the New York Times, and other papers published corrections; despite these corrections, the photograph continues to be used by critics of Israel as a symbol of Israeli aggression and violence.

During the 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis, the Israeli army destroyed the al-Jalaa Highrise, a building housing the AP's Gaza offices and Al Jazeera offices. Israel stated that the building housed Hamas military intelligence and had given advanced warning of the strike, and no civilians were harmed. AP CEO Gary Pruitt released a statement on May 16, stating that he "had no indication Hamas was in the building" and called on the Israeli government to provide the evidence. He said that "the world will know less about what is happening in Gaza because of what happened today."

On May 17, US secretary of state Antony Blinken said he had not seen any evidence that Hamas operated from the building housing the AP and Al Jazeera, but it is the job of others to handle intelligence matters. Israel reportedly shared intelligence with American officials and U.S. president Joe Biden showing Hamas offices inside the building.

Reporters Without Borders asked the International Criminal Court to investigate the bombing as a possible war crime.

On June 8, the Israeli ambassador to the US, Gilad Erdan, met with AP CEO Gary Pruitt and vice president for foreign news, Ian Phillips, to discuss the operation. In coordination with the IDF, Erdan said the site was used by Hamas intelligence officials to develop and carry out electronic warfare operations, and that IDF did not suspect the AP was aware of the alleged covert Hamas presence. After the meeting the AP stated "We have yet to receive evidence to support these claims". Erdan later tweeted "Israel is willing to assist AP in rebuilding its offices and operations in Gaza."

In May 2024, Israeli officials seized equipment broadcasting a live stream of Northern Gaza from the town of Sderot as part of a ban on Al Jazeera Media in Israel which had received footage from the broadcast. The move was condemned by multiple journalism organizations, Israeli opposition politicians, and US government officials. In a press briefing, the spokesperson for the National Security Council commented on the seizure, saying "The White House and the State Department immediately engaged with the government of Israel at high levels to express our serious concern and ask them to reverse this action." Later that day, Israeli Communication Minister Shlomo Karhi announced via Twitter that the equipment would be returned to the AP and the Israeli Government would review the positioning of the AP broadcast to determine if it posed a security risk.

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