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Associated Press, or AP, is an American news agency, the world's largest such organization. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers and broadcast 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 over 10 million images. The AP has 242 bureaus and serves 121 countries, with a diverse international staff drawing from all over the world. The AP Stylebook has become the de facto standard for newswriting in the country.

The collapse of United Press International as a major competitor, AP's traditional rival, has left it 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 Associated Press Building in New York City

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 a newspaper news-hole without losing the essence of the story. The explosion of media and news outlets with the arrival of the Internet has made such concise writing less necessary, and raised the need for more feature-style writing.

It has also 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.

U.S. 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 by representatives of five competitive New York City newspapers, who wanted to pool resources to collect news from Europe. 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 joined in the agreement were the Sun, the Journal of Commerce, the Courier and Enquirer, the Herald, and the Express. Until then, newspapers competed by sending reporters out in rowboats to meet the ships as they arrived in the harbor. In 1849 it 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 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.
  • 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.
  • 1941: AP expands from print into radio.
  • 1994: AP launches APTV, a global video newsgathering agency.

AP Sports Polls

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-A 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 is particularly notable because, since the NCAA does not award a championship in football, the team finishing at the top of the AP Poll at the end of the season is awarded what is considered a football national championship. However, the AP Poll is one of several respected polls used, thus resulting in years of multiple "champions". The AP Poll is the longest serving college football poll, having started in 1936.

Current events

Guantánamo Bay detainees

The Associated Press made available for download the unclassified portions of the dossiers of 59 Guantánamo Bay detainees, which they acquired through Freedom of Information Act requests.

Main article: Associated Press library of Guantanamo Bay detainee dossiers

In 2005, AP requested that the Department of Defense provide transcripts and related documents from the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs). The Department of Defense released redacted versions of the transcripts and related documents, claiming that the release of the detainees' names and other identifying information in unredacted versions would violate their privacy (as protected by Exemption 6 to the Freedom of Information Act). The Department of Defense never claimed that the release of unredacted versions would compromise national security. In 2005, U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff ordered the Department of Defense to ask each detainee for permission for their names to be released, and on January 24, 2006, Rakoff ruled in favor of the Associated Press, finding that the Department of Defense had failed to offer adequate evidence to support their claims and that the detainees' had no reasonable expectation of privacy under the order, and therefore ordered the Department of Defense to release the unredacted transcripts and related documents. Documents of only 317 of the 490 detainees were released on March 3, 2006. Although justice Rakoff had already dismissed this argument, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman justified withholding the names out of a concern for the detainees' privacy.

Controversy

A pair of misleading articles by John Solomon of the Associated Press about Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid accepting boxing tickets prompted a flurry of criticism from prominent left-wing and center-left blogs including Talking Points Memo, Media Matters, and The American Prospect. The Associated Press published a reply to the criticisms of the first article by Talking Points Memo and Media Matters, but this reply contained serious factual errors and they did not publish a correction. Nonetheless, in an internal email, the Associated Press praised Solomon's work in part on the grounds that it attracted so much attention from blogs and awarded Solomon a bonus of $500.

Governance

The Associated Press is governed by an elected board of directors.

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See also

  • Hal Buell - former head of Photography Service (photo director) at AP.
  • Joe Rosenthal - war photographer for AP.

External links

References

  1. AP Is Older Than Was Thought, Papers Show, Associated Press, January 31 2006
  2. Judge Orders Release of Gitmo Detainee IDs, Washington Post, January 24 2006
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