Five rival New York papers pooled costs to cover a war, creating AP
Sending dispatches from the Mexican-American War was expensive, so in May 1846 five competing New York dailies agreed to split the bill. That thrifty arrangement became the Associated Press, a cooperative whose reporting later reached more than 1,300 outlets and collected 60 Pulitzer Prizes, 36 of them for photographs.
Moses Yale Beach, the second publisher of The Sun, organised the venture alongside the Herald, the Courier and Enquirer, the Journal of Commerce and the Evening Express; The New York Times signed on in September 1851. Called the New York Associated Press at first, it drew fire from a Western rival formed in 1862 over monopoly pricing. In 1892 Chicago editor Victor Lawson exposed a secret deal in which some of its leaders shared news and resale profits with United Press, and the New York group dissolved.
Reorganised under Melville Stone from 1893 to 1921, the agency kept adopting new gadgets. In 1849 an affiliated harbour association had already set up the first bureau outside the country, at Halifax, Nova Scotia, to meet incoming European ships. Marconi's wireless covered a yacht race off Sandy Hook in 1899, teleprinters arrived in 1914, and in 1935 Wirephoto began sending pictures over leased phone lines on the day they were shot, starting with an air crash near Morehouse, New York. Radio news followed in 1941, a radio network in 1974, and the APTV video agency in 1994.
Its people paid prices too. Stringer Mark Kellogg died at the Little Bighorn in 1876, the first AP correspondent killed on the job. Ruth Cowan Nash became the first American woman war correspondent in 1943. Joseph Morton was executed at Mauthausen in 1945, the only Allied reporter the Axis put to death. A Supreme Court ruling that same year held that the AP had broken antitrust law by barring members from supplying nonmembers.
Money has shifted. American newspapers supplied about 30 per cent of revenue in 2007 but only 10 per cent by 2024. The agency moved from 50 Rockefeller Plaza, its home for 66 years, in 2004, and to 200 Liberty Street in 2017. In 2008 it launched a dedicated iPhone application on stage at Apple's developer conference, and today it runs 235 bureaus in 94 countries.
Source: Associated Press
