Associated

The 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 radio and tv stations in the United States, who both contribute stories to it and use material written by its staffers. more...

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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 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 United States.

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 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 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. This became the Harbor News Association. After the Civil War, the owners of these newspapers realized that they, through their newspapers, were all essentially paying for the same information from their reporters. (Reporters covering the battle sites of the Civil War used the telegraph to send in their reports). The owners of the newspapers realized that it would be cheaper to have a service collect and pay for the information once from the telegraph company. At this time, the Harbor News Association became 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 joined in the agreement were the Sun, the Journal of Commerce, the Courier and Enquirer, the Herald, and the Express. Until the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the Penny Press, newspapers competed by sending reporters out in rowboats to meet the ships as they arrived in the harbor. 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.

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