Associated Press

• 1. Introduction

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  The Associated Press sent its first war correspondent to cover the Mexican-American War in 1846, and the organization that dispatched him has not stopped since. Today the AP operates 235 news bureaus across 94 countries, and more than 128 million people visit its website each month. It has won 60 Pulitzer Prizes. It filed a federal lawsuit against the White House in 2025 over press access. And its staff have been executed by the Axis, kidnapped in Mogadishu, and bombed out of their Gaza offices. How does a news cooperative founded by five New York newspapers to split telegraph costs become the backbone of global information? And what happens when an organization that insists on independence from government finds itself in direct legal conflict with the presidency itself?

• 2. Born From War Costs

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  Moses Yale Beach, the second publisher of The Sun, organized the original venture in May 1846. His idea was straightforward: share the expense of wiring dispatches from the front. The New York Herald, the New York Courier and Enquirer, The Journal of Commerce, and the New York Evening Express all joined. The result was the New York Associated Press, or NYAP. The New York Times became a member in September 1851.

  The NYAP was not without enemies from early on. The Western Associated Press, formed in 1862, accused it of monopolistic practices and unfair pricing. The conflict came to a head when Victor Lawson, editor and publisher of the Chicago Daily News, completed an investigation in 1892 that exposed a secret agreement. Several NYAP principals had arranged to share its news and its resale profits with United Press, a rival agency. The scandal dissolved the NYAP that December. The Western Associated Press was then incorporated in Illinois as the Associated Press, a new organization on sounder ethical footing.

  A court challenge soon forced another move. An 1900 Illinois Supreme Court ruling in Inter Ocean Publishing Co. v. Associated Press found the AP was operating as a public utility in restraint of trade. Rather than comply with Illinois law, the AP relocated to New York City, where cooperative laws offered more favorable ground.

• 3. The Infrastructure of News

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  Melville Stone, founder of the Chicago Daily News, served as AP general manager from 1893 to 1921 and watched the cooperative grow into a genuinely national institution. The AP adopted teletype for its New York service in 1914, eventually building a worldwide network of machines operating at 60 words per minute.

  Kent Cooper led the AP from 1925 to 1948 and pushed its reach into South America, Europe, and the Middle East. He also pressed the AP to claim a stronger position against the press agency cartel that included Reuters and Havas, which later became Agence France-Presse. Cooper lobbied at the League of Nations in 1927 to renegotiate the tripartite contract that divided news markets among those agencies.

  Photography changed the cooperative's ambitions in 1935. The AP launched its Wirephoto network that year, transmitting news photographs over leased private telephone lines on the very day they were taken. The first image sent over the network showed an airplane crash in Morehouse, New York, on New Year's Day, 1935. The initial network linked only New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, but it eventually spanned the entire United States, giving AP a significant advantage over competitors. The first female AP member, Zell Hart Deming, had joined in 1928, and in 1943 the AP sent Ruth Cowan Nash to cover the deployment of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps to Algeria, making Nash the first American woman war correspondent.

• 4. Reporters in Harm's Way

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  Mark Kellogg, a stringer, was the first AP correspondent killed while reporting. He died at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. The tradition of sending reporters into danger has produced both heroism and tragedy ever since.

  AP war correspondent Joseph Morton was executed by the Germans at Mauthausen concentration camp in 1945, along with nine OSS men and four British SOE agents. Morton remains the only Allied correspondent to be executed by the Axis during the entire war. That same year, Paris bureau chief Edward Kennedy defied an Allied headquarters news blackout and reported Nazi Germany's surrender. Kennedy's justification was that German radio had already broadcast the news. The AP dismissed him for it, an episode the source describes as bitter.

  In Prague in 1951, bureau chief William N. Oatis was convicted of espionage by the Communist government of Czechoslovakia. He was held until 1953, when his sentence was reduced by 10 years and he was released.

  In 1994, reporter Tina Susman was on her fourth trip to Somalia when Somali rebels outnumbered her bodyguards in Mogadishu and dragged her from her car in broad daylight. She was held for 20 days. The AP asked the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Washington Post to suppress any reporting on her kidnapping to avoid encouraging the captors.

• 5. Legal Fights and Controversies

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  A Supreme Court ruling in 1945, Associated Press v. United States, found the cooperative had been violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. The AP had prohibited member newspapers from sharing news with nonmembers and had made it very difficult for outsiders to join. The decision reshaped how the cooperative operated.

  The AP's wartime conduct attracted scrutiny decades later. In 2017, German historian Norman Domeier of the University of Vienna brought wider attention to an arrangement between the AP and the Nazi government involving the exchange of press photographs while the United States was at war with Germany. The exchange ran through the Bureau Laux, operated by Waffen-SS photographer Helmut Laux, and used a courier flying daily between Lisbon and the United States. From 1944 the exchange also ran through Stockholm. An estimated 40,000 photographs passed between the two enemies through this channel.

  On the 23rd of April 2013, hackers seized control of the AP's Twitter account and posted a false report about attacks on the White House, claiming President Obama had been injured. The Dow Jones Industrial Average briefly fell by 143 points in the resulting flash crash.

  In 2025, restrictions on AP access were imposed by the second Trump administration after the AP refused to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the "Gulf of America." Two AP reporters were barred from White House events. The AP sued in Associated Press v. Budowich on the 21st of February 2025. Judge Trevor McFadden ruled on the 8th of April 2025 that the White House must lift the restrictions while the lawsuit proceeded. On the 6th of June 2025, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit stayed that order, allowing the White House to resume barring AP from some events.

• 6. Counting Votes and Ranking Teams

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  The AP has collected and published presidential election data since 1848. It is one of only two organizations that verify election results in every city and county across the United States, covering races from the presidency down to governors and other statewide offices. Major outlets wait for AP polling data before declaring a winner in presidential races.

  The AP introduced AP VoteCast in 2018, developed together with NORC at the University of Chicago, to replace traditional exit polls and address the biases that had plagued legacy polling methods.

  Sports polls have been part of the AP's work since 1936, when the college football rankings began. The poll started including the top 25 teams in 1989, and since 1969 the final poll of each season has been released after all bowl games are played. The AP released an all-time Top 25 in 2016, by which point 22 different programs had finished at number one since the poll's inception. The college basketball poll dates to 1949, starting with 20 teams, shrinking to 10 during the 1960-61 season, and expanding back to 25 beginning in 1989-90.

  In May 2020, AP photographers Dar Yasin, Mukhtar Khan, and Channi Anand received the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography. In 2024 the AP won an Oscar for the documentary 20 Days in Mariupol, a first-person account of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022.