Associated Press

The Associated Press (AP) 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 60 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.

In 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 (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.^{[citation needed]}

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.

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.^{[peacock prose]} 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(c)(3) 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 (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.

Governance

The AP is governed by an elected board of directors. Since 2022, the board's chairperson is Gracia C. Martore, former president and CEO of Tegna, Inc.

Conditions of reporting

AP reports from countries where press freedom is restricted, sometimes under adverse circumstances, and operates out of more than 100 regional offices.^{[citation needed]}

United States First Amendment lawsuit

In 2025, restrictions preventing AP reporting in the U.S. were imposed by the second Trump administration. In February 2025, two AP reporters were barred from covering several events at the White House, because of the AP's refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the "Gulf of America", as directed by the White House.

The restrictions against AP were extended to other reporting opportunities such as in Air Force One. On February 21, 2025, the AP sued the Trump administration in Associated Press v. Budowich for blocking their attendance.

On February 24, 2025, a federal judge declined to issue an immediate order compelling the White House to reinstate access to presidential events to AP, although he encouraged the White House to do so. Following the decision, the White House released a statement asserting that "the ability to pose questions to the President of the United States in the Oval Office and aboard Air Force One constitutes a privilege extended to journalists, rather than a legally enshrined right."

On April 8, 2025, Judge Trevor McFadden ruled that the White House must lift the access restrictions they placed on the AP while the AP v. Budowich lawsuit moves forward. On June 6, 2025, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit imposed a stay upon the lower court's order, allowing the White House to resume barring access to some media events.

Election polls

The AP is one of two organizations that collect and verify election results in every city and county across the United States, including races for the U.S. president, the Senate and House of Representatives, and governors as well as other statewide offices. Known for accuracy, the organization has collected and published presidential election data since 1848.

Major news outlets rely on the polling data and results provided by the Associated Press before declaring a winner in major political races, particularly the presidential election.

In declaring the winners, the AP has historically relied on a network of local reporters with first-hand knowledge of assigned territories who also have long-standing relationships with county clerks as well as other local officials. Moreover, the AP monitors and gathers data from county websites and electronic feeds provided by states.

The research team further verifies the results by considering demographics, number of absentee ballots, and other political issues that may have an effect on the final results. In 2018, the AP introduced a new system called AP VoteCast, which was developed together with NORC at the University of Chicago in order to further improve the reliability of its data and overcome biases of its legacy exit poll.

Sports polls

The AP conducts polls for numerous college sports in the United States. The AP college football rankings were created in 1936, and began including the top 25 teams in 1989. Since 1969, the final poll of each season has been released after all bowl games have been played. The AP released its all-time Top 25 in 2016. As of 2017^[update], 22 different programs had finished in the number one spot of the poll since its inception.

In the pre-bowl game determination era, the AP poll was often used as the distinction for a national champion in football.

The AP college basketball poll has been used as a guide for which teams deserve national attention. The AP first began its poll of college basketball teams in 1949, and has since conducted over 1,100 polls. The college basketball poll started with 20 teams and was reduced to 10 during the 1960–61 college basketball season.

It returned to 20 teams in 1968–69 and expanded to 25 beginning in 1989–90. The final poll for each season is released prior to the conclusion of the NCAA tournament, so all data includes regular season games only. In 2017, The AP released a list of the Top 100 teams of all time. The poll counted poll appearances (one point) and No. 1 rankings (two points) to rank each team.

Sports awards

Baseball

The AP began its Major League Baseball Manager of the Year Award in 1959, for a manager in each league. From 1984 to 2000, the award was given to one manager in all of MLB. The winners were chosen by a national panel of AP baseball writers and radio men. The award was discontinued in 2001.

Basketball

Every year, the AP releases the names of the winners of its AP College Basketball Player of the Year and AP College Basketball Coach of the Year awards. It also honors a group of All-American players.

Football

• AP NFL Most Valuable Player
• AP NFL Offensive Player of the Year
• AP NFL Defensive Player of the Year
• AP NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year
• AP NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year
• AP NFL Coach of the Year
• AP NFL Comeback Player of the Year
• AP College Football Player of the Year

Associated Press Television News

In 1994, London-based Associated Press Television (APTV) was founded to provide agency news material to television broadcasters. In 1998, the AP purchased Worldwide Television News (WTN) from the ABC News division of The Walt Disney Company, Nine Network Australia and ITN London. The AP publishes 70,000 videos and 6,000 hours of live video per year, as of 2016^[update].

The agency also provides seven simultaneous live video channels, AP Direct for broadcasters, and six live channels on AP Live Choice for broadcasters and digital publishers. The AP was the first news agency to launch a live video news service in 2003.

AP Stylebook

Litigation and controversies

AP collaboration with Nazi Germany

The AP collaborated with Nazi Germany and gave it access to its photographic archives for its antisemitic Nazi propaganda. AP also cooperated with the Nazi regime through censorship.^{[clarification needed]}