Last Updated: May 20, 1999
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The AP at 150
In 1848, an unlikely bunch of competing newspapers
changed history when they decided to cooperate on gathering some news
T he news business took a modern turn 150 years ago. When an unlikely
collection of highbrow, racy and ranting press organs built The Associated
Press on the spine of the newly invented telegraph, they created an approach
to journalism that is utterly recognizable today.
Objectivity? Back then? "My business is merely to communicate facts,"
stated AP’s first Washington correspondent. "My instructions do not allow
me to make any comments upon the facts which I communicate."
Disclosure? AP’s founding press lords quickly made their agency a tool
for prying news from official sources for their common good. They wanted
AP in the front-row seat and the forward trench.
Even a routine device of covering a speech these days resonates in the
distant past. When President Clinton makes a State of the Union speech,
news organizations count how many times he is interrupted for applause.
AP did that in 1863 — at the Gettysburg address.
The ideas behind The Associated Press and its original structure go
back to the dawn of a technology that both fed and enlarged the appetite
for news. Publishers scrambled to find ways to cut the costs of using the
telegraph while maintaining their older snail’s-pace methods of news gathering.
Theirs were aggressive, partisan and, in some cases, sensational papers,
sharply divided on abolition, Civil War conscription and politics. Only
the straight goods would satisfy them all.
Driven by David Hale of The Journal of Commerce, publishers as varied
as Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune — that "Great Moral Organ" —
and James Bennett Gordon of the flashy, penny-a-paper New York Herald joined
in the compact. The Sun, Express, and Courier and Enquirer also came on
board.
The newsmen were visionaries, but hardly altruists.
"There was no immediate thought of benefiting any but these six papers
and there was no disposition to look upon the collection of news as a great
public service," wrote AP’s Oliver Gramling in his 1940 book, "AP — The
Story of News." "The organization was by no means all that it might have
been, but it was a beginning."
Today in its 150th anniversary year, the AP serves more than 1,500 newspapers
and 6,000 broadcast stations in the United States — more than 16,000 worldwide.
Its tools are new: Digital photography speeds pictures from AP cameras
through laptops and satellite phones to newspapers in minutes; words once
tapped by hand in Morse code now move as fast as 35,000 baud. Computer-assisted
reporting increasingly underpins the range of spot news, enterprise and
investigative work.
But there’s still a lot of the old religion, amazingly so. To see the
constants, one need only look at the original Washington correspondent,
Lawrence Gobright, and a few of his successors.
Summoned in 1862 to testify to a congressional committee about how he
was getting so much news past Civil War censors, Gobright gave voice to
the credos of cooperative news gathering — and some of the frustrations
of reporting — that have endured if not intensified in the years since.
Here he was, on the Lincoln administration’s spin doctors: "The heads
of departments are not as communicative as I would desire. ... I have no
doubt that they try to put the best appearance upon things."
On declining to name a source: "I don’t know that my informant would
object to my giving his name ... but at present I would rather not do so."
And on playing it straight down the middle: "Some special correspondents
may write to suit the temper of their own organs. I try to write without
regard to men or politics."
Sentiments like those, born in the chill mists of Atlantic harbors where
the founding New York Associated Press began collecting trans-Atlantic
news from European steamers, are threaded through the cooperative’s history.
Beth Campbell Short, a Washington correspondent from 1936 to 1940, once
recalled covering a speech by Eleanor Roosevelt in which the first lady
pronounced that her remarks would be off the record.
"I stood up and said, ‘Mrs. Roosevelt, I’m with The Associated Press,
and you can’t have things off the record with 400 people listening!’ And
she said, ‘You’re right, Beth, I can’t.’ She went ahead and told whatever
it was on the record."
In March 1997, when Clinton ruptured a tendon during a late-night spill
at golfer Greg Norman’s Florida estate, a junior White House aide called
AP’s Ron Fournier and told him two things:
1. Clinton is in the hospital with a minor injury.
2. That’s off the record.
From the lobby of his Florida motel, Fournier, now chief political correspondent,
told the aide: "There is no way this can be off the record." Came the reply:
"You’ve got to be guided by your own ethics." Indeed. Fournier’s news alert
quickly hit the wires.
AP built a reputation as the outfit that was always there, whether the
event was the hellfire of Iwo Jima, a presidential trip or a college basketball
game. Being there has cost 23 AP journalists their lives.
Henry Villard accompanied Abraham Lincoln from Springfield, Ill., to
his 1861 inauguration. AP’s Joseph L. Gilbert recorded not only Lincoln’s
words at Gettysburg but the five applause interruptions before the final
ovation. And at the scene of the Lincoln assassination, Gobright examined
the killer’s gun and filed that evening: "The President was shot in a theatre
to-night, and is perhaps mortally wounded."
Joe Rosenthal exemplified AP’s tradition of being there, on the front
lines of war. His Pulitzer-winning picture of U.S. Marines raising the
flag on Iwo Jima is perhaps the most famous AP picture. AP is there whenever
a president is in public, and in the seat designated A-1 at the Supreme
Court.
Much has changed since the early days, when AP coverage was largely
stenographic.
"Studying the columns of 19th century Associated Press telegraphic news
is a chore only as interesting as verbatim accounts of filibusters in Congress,
assorted stock quotations, and pages from the ledger of a compulsive clerk
in a seaport can be," scholar Menahem Blondheim wrote in his book, "News
Over the Wire."
The AP, its work often appearing anonymously, slowly gained more visibility.
Piracy of AP news by competing services prompted the board to order in
1917 that all material be credited to the agency in member newspapers.
Three years later, Kirke Simpson’s Pulitzer-winning coverage of the
return of the Unknown Soldier hastened the end of the unknown AP writer.
Simpson set the AP standard for poetry-on-deadline with writing that
a generation of schoolchildren would memorize ("Alone, he lies in the narrow
cell of stone that guards his body; but his soul has entered into the spirit
that is America.") Newspapers pressed AP to say who wrote the stories,
and bylines gradually began to show up in a service where their absence
had been a badge of honor.
By the dawn of World War II, bylines were increasingly common. They
had spread through the Special News Service, a 1930s showcase of AP feature
and analytical writing, photography and graphics that looks contemporary
even now, except for the black and white.
The organization worked to rid itself of "the ghost of that ancient
story that The Associated Press stifles the expression of personality,
surrounds its reporters with a thousand ‘don’ts,’ " as chief news executive
Byron Price said in a 1937 memo. He called for "distinctive writing, abounding
in variety and originality of style."
But not at the expense of accuracy. That was AP’s edge over rivals that
were considered less reliable if often better written.
The greatest of those rivals, United Press (later United Press International),
spent the better part of this century in blazing competition with "Rox"
— a nickname for AP derived from Melville Stone, general manager for 25
years. Today the competition includes TV, syndicated services, other wire
services and — in ways not yet fully developed or understood — the Internet.
And still there is the obligation to be there, do it fast and get it
right. That’s why Gobright, who went from pigeon post and pony express
to telegraph in his lifetime, looks like a thoroughly modern man in the
age of satellite.
Woodward is an AP staff writer in Washington.The AP at 150
