Associated Press


The Associated Press is an American not-for-profit news agency headquartered in New York City.
Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association, and produces news reports that are distributed to its members, major U.S. daily newspapers and radio and television broadcasters. Since the Pulitzer Prize was established in 1917, the AP has earned 59 of them, including 36 for photography. The AP distributes its widely used AP Stylebook, its AP polls tracking NCAA sports, and its election polls and results during U.S. elections. It sponsors the National Football League's annual awards.
By 2016, news collected by the AP was published and republished by more than 1,300 newspapers and broadcasters. The AP operates 235 news bureaus in 94 countries, and publishes in English, Spanish, and Arabic. It also operates the AP Radio Network, which provides twice hourly newscasts and daily sportscasts for broadcast and satellite radio and television stations. 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. As part of their cooperative agreement with the AP, most member news organizations grant automatic permission for the AP to distribute their local news reports. As of 2025, the AP attracts more than 128 million monthly website visits, making it one of the top 10 news websites in the U.S.

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, 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, the organization faced competition from the Western Associated Press, 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 had entered into a secret agreement with United Press, a rival organization, to share NYAP news and the profits of reselling it. The revelations led to the demise of the NYAP and in December 1892, the Western Associated Press was incorporated in Illinois as the Associated Press. A 1900 Illinois Supreme Court decision 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.
Melville Stone, who had founded the Chicago Daily News in 1875, 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, the Middle East. Under Kent Cooper, the AP became a more prevalent member of a press agency cartel made up of Reuters and Havas. 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 only about 30% of its revenue from United States newspapers, and by 2024, this had declined to 10%. 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.

Web resources

The AP's multi-topic structure has resulted in web portals such as Yahoo! and MSN posting its articles, often relying on the AP as their first source for news coverage of breaking news items. This and the constant updating evolving stories require has had a major impact on the AP's public image and role, giving new credence to the AP's ongoing mission of having staff for covering every area of news fully and promptly. In 2007, Google announced that it was paying to receive AP content, to be displayed in Google News, interrupted from late 2009 to mid-2010 due to a licensing dispute.
A 2017 study by NewsWhip revealed that AP content was more engaged with on Facebook than content from any individual English-language publisher.

Nonprofit

In June 2024, Axios reported that the AP would be launching a 501 nonprofit organization with the goal of expanding state and local news, hoping to raise at least $100 million in philanthropic funds to address the "crisis in local news."

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 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, 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 $8.8million. The AP also announced that it would have posted a loss of $4.4million had it not liquidated its German-language news service for $13.2million.
  • 2011: AP revenue dropped $14.7million in 2010. 2010 revenue totaled $631million, 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 $1.6million from $183.6million in 2015. The 2015 profit figure was bolstered by a one-time, $165million 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.