The Associated Press (AP) is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staffers. Many newspapers and broadcasters outside the United States are AP subscribers, paying a fee to use AP material without being contributive members of the cooperative.

As of 2005, the AP's news is published and republished by more than 1,700 newspapers, in addition to more than 5,000 television and radio broadcasters. The cooperative's photograph library consists of more than 10 million images. It operates 243 news bureaus and serves 121 countries, with a diverse international staff drawing from all over the world.

As part of their cooperative agreement with the Associated Press, most member news organizations grant automatic permission for the AP to distribute their local news reports. For example, on page two of every edition of The Washington Post, the newspaper's masthead includes the statement, "The Associated Press is entitled exclusively to use for republication of all news dispatches credited to it or not otherwise credited in this paper and all local news of spontaneous origin published herein."

The AP Stylebook has become the de facto standard for news writing in the United States. The AP employs the "inverted pyramid formula" for writing that enables news outlets to edit a story to fit its available publication space without losing the story's essential meaning and news information.

The decline of AP's traditional rival, United Press International, as a major American competitor in 1993 left the AP as the only nationally oriented news service based in the United States. Other English-language news services, such as Reuters and the English language service of Agence France-Presse, are based outside the United States.

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History
The AP was formed in May 1846 by a group of American newspapers that sought to pool resources in order to better collect and report news coming from Europe. Prior to this, the newspapers had competed by sending reporters out in rowboats to meet ships bringing news from Europe as they arrived in the harbor. The owners of these newspapers realized that they were all paying for essentially the same information and determined it would be more cost effective to have a service collect and pay for all the information once via telegraph. Their new organization originally was named the Harbor News Association; it later was renamed the Associated Press. A driving force in the organization's formation was Moses Yale Beach, publisher of the New York Sun, when he invited other New York publishers to join the Sun in a cooperative venture to cover the Mexican-American War. The four New York papers that joined in the agreement with the Sun were the Journal of Commerce, the Courier and Enquirer, the Herald, and the Express.

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.
1861: Facing censorship in covering the American Civil War, reporters first filed under the anonymous byline "from the Associated Press agent."
1876: Mark Kellogg, a stringer, is the first AP news correspondent to be killed while reporting the news, at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. His final dispatch: "I go with (Commander George Armstrong) Custer and will be at the death."
1893: Melville E. Stone becomes the general manager of the reorganized AP, a post he holds until 1921. Under his leadership, the AP grows to be one of the world's most prominent news agencies.
1899: AP uses 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: AP introduces the Teletype, which transmitted directly to printers over telegraph wires. Eventually a worldwide network of 60-word-per-minute Teletype machines is built.
1919: Upton Sinclair includes a scathing criticism of the AP in his investigative book on contemporary journalism, The Brass Check.
1935: AP initiates WirePhoto, the world's first wire service for photographs. The first photograph to transfer over the network depicted an airplane crash in Morehouseville, New York, on New Year's Day, 1935.
1938: AP expands to new offices at 50 Rockefeller Plaza (known as "50 Rock") in the newly built Rockefeller Center in New York City, which would remain its headquarters for 68 years; in 2004 it relocated to larger facilities at 450 W. 33rd St. in Manhattan.
1941: AP expands from print to radio broadcast news.
1945: AP Paris bureau chief Edward Kennedy defies an Allied headquarters news blackout to report Nazi Germany’s surrender, touching off a bitter episode that leads to his eventual dismissal by the AP. Kennedy maintains that he reported only what German radio already had broadcast.
1994: AP launches APTV, a global video newsgathering agency, headquartered in London.
2004: The AP moves its headquarters from 50 Rock to W. 33rd St.
2008: Associated Press President and CEO Tom Curley states that "shadow of the September 11 terror attacks is eclipsing press freedom and other constitutional safeguards in the United States."

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AP Sports Polls
The AP is known for its Associated Press polls on numerous college sports in the United States. The AP polls ranking the top 25 NCAA Division I (Football Bowl Subdivision and Football Championship Subdivision) college football and NCAA Division I men's and women's college basketball teams are the most well known. The AP composes the polls by collecting and compiling the top-25 votes of numerous designated sports journalists. The AP poll of college football was particularly notable for many years because it helped determine the ranking of teams at the end of the regular season for the collegiate Bowl Championship Series until the AP, citing conflict of interest, asked for the poll to be removed from the bowl series. Beginning in the 2005 season, the Harris Interactive College Football Poll took the AP's place in the bowl series formula. The AP poll is the longest serving national poll in college football, having begun in 1936.

Each year on 31 March the AP announces the winner of the NCAA Men's basketball "player of the year" (POY) award.

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Associated Press Television News
In 1994, London-based Associated Press Television (APTV) was founded to provide agency news material to television broadcasters. Other existing providers of such material at the time were Reuters Television and Worldwide Television News (WTN).

In 1998, APTV left the Associated Press building in the Central London and merged with WTN to create Associated Press Television News (APTN) in the existing WTN building in North London.

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Increased cancellation notices
2008 has seen an increase in the number of intent-to-cancel notices, notices that AP requires to be issued two years in advance. According to Editor & Publisher, "the recent decisions to drop AP service follow the planned AP rate structure change, which was announced in 2007 and takes effect in 2009....AP officials said member newspapers would begin to find out in July what their exact fees would be for 2009, which prompted some of the recent decisions."  News organizations cited its cost, its commoditization in an era of free online news, and a renewed emphasis on original content to remain relevant in such an environment.

Among the organizations canceling are larger outlets like Dow Jones , Tribune Company, New York Daily News , and Star Tribune of Minneapolis , as well as smaller-market publications such as The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Wash.  and The Bakersfield Californian .

In what was at least in part a response to AP's announced changes, eight Ohio newspapers created their own local network, the Ohio News Organization, including The Plain Dealer of Cleveland, The Columbus Dispatch and The Cincinnati Enquirer
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Controversies
Jamil Hussein
Some questions were raised about the legitimacy of police captain Jamil Hussein as a source for AP reporting of sectarian violence in Iraq. On January 4, 2007 the Iraqi Interior Ministry recognized Jamil as an active member of the Baghdad police force, and said he faces arrest for talking to journalists. Ministry spokesman Abdul Karim Khalaf, who had previously denied the existence of Hussein, acknowledged that the officer was assigned to the Khadra police station

Christopher Newton
The Associated Press fired Washington, D.C. bureau reporter Christopher Newton in September 2002, accusing him of fabricating at least 40 people and organizations since 2000. Some of the nonexistent agencies quoted in his stories included "Education Alliance," the "Institute for Crime and Punishment in Chicago," "Voice for the Disabled," and "People for Civil Rights."

Tuvia Grossman
During the Second Intifada a caption of an Associated Press photograph of an Israeli police officer defending him from a violent Palestinian mob misidentified him as a Palestinian instead of as a Jewish-American. The photograph, publicized in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other newspaper publications worldwide, suggested Israeli brutality by the officer acting in Tuvia's defense.

Bloggers and Fair Use
In June 2008 Associated Press stated it would be defining guidelines on how many words from its articles and broadcasts could be excerpted by internet bloggers and Web sites without infringing on its copyright. Its first initiative was a letter to Rogers Cadenhead's "Drudge Retort" news links site requesting the removal of items quoting from 39 to 79 words of AP articles. After an outcry from bloggers, A.P. admitted its letter to Drudge Retort was “heavy-handed.”  It later clarified that it would challenge blog postings “when we feel the use is more reproduction than reference, or when others are encouraged to cut and paste.” It then retreated from that position, announcing it would be reviewing its standards.

Ron Fournier
In 2004, Ron Fournier, a reporter with the AP's Washington bureau, left the AP to take a Harvard Institute of Politics fellowship. During this period, he also co-wrote the book Applebee's America with Matthew Dowd, a Republican strategist, and Doug Sosnik, a Democratic strategist. In 2006, he took a position as editor-in-chief of a new Internet website called Hotsoup.com, which aimed to foster discussion on a number of topics including politics. The site failed to catch on, however, and Fournier returned to the AP in March 2007 as its Online Political Editor, after considering a “a senior advisory role” with John McCain's presidential campaign.

In May 2008, Fournier was named the acting Washington bureau chief, replacing his "mentor" Sandy Johnson. Since taking over the position, Fournier has led a dramatic shift in the AP's policy, moving it away from the neutral and objective tone it had become known for and toward a more opinionated style that would make judgments when conflicting opinions were presented in a story.

On August 23, 2008, following U.S. Senator and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama's announcement of his selection of Senator Joe Biden as a running mate, Fournier wrote a widely circulated piece entitled "Analysis: Biden pick shows lack of confidence".  A Washington Monthly columnist described the piece as "mirror  the Republican line with minimal variation".  Editor & Publisher noted that Fournier's article "gained wide linkage at the Drudge Report, Hot Air and numerous other conservative sites...."

Coverage of the 2008 Democratic National Convention
Several media outlets, including Editor & Publisher magazine , MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann , and the blog Gawker , raised issue with AP reporter Charles Babington's analysis "Obama spares details, keeps up attacks." . According to Editor & Publisher, Babington's article, which was critical of the speech's supposed lack of substance, was transmitted alongside a second AP piece that "offered a detailed look at seven specific policy proposals in the speech (and expressed doubts about all of them)."  Recently, Mr. Babbington has been more critical of the McCain campaign, writing an article on September 11th questioning the accuracy of his recent ads  and challenging his campaign's divisive rhetoric on the Obama campaign "redistributing wealth"

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Governance
The Associated Press is governed by an elected board of directors.

William Dean Singleton, Chairman and CEO, MediaNews Group, Denver, Colorado
Tom Curley, President & CEO
R. Jack Fishman, Publisher and Managing editor, Citizen Tribune, Morristown, Tennessee
Dennis J. FitzSimons, Chairman President and CEO, Tribune Company, Chicago, Illinois
Walter E. Hussman Jr., Publisher, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Little Rock, Arkansas
Julie Inskeep, Publisher, Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, Fort Wayne, Indiana
Boisfeuillet (Bo) Jones, Publisher and CEO, The Washington Post, Washington, D.C.
Mary Junck, President and CEO, Lee Enterprises, Davenport, Iowa
David Lord, President, Pioneer Newspapers, Seattle, Washington
Kenneth W. Lowe, President and CEO, E.W. Scripps Company, Cincinnati, Ohio
Douglas H. McCorkindale, Chairman, Gannett, McLean, Virginia
R. John Mitchell, Publisher, Rutland Herald, Rutland, Vermont
Steven O. Newhouse, Chairman, Advance.Net, New York, New York
Gary Pruitt, Chairman, President and CEO, The McClatchy Company, Sacramento, California
Michael E. Reed, CEO, Liberty Group Publishing, Inc., Downer's Grove, Illinois
Bruce T. Reese, President and CEO, Bonneville International, Salt Lake City, Utah
Jon Rust, Publisher, Southeast Missourian, Cape Girardeau, Missouri
Jay R. Smith, President, Cox Newspapers, Atlanta, Georgia
David Westin, President, ABC News, New York, New York
H. Graham Woodlief, President, Publishing Division, Media General, Richmond, Virginia
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Web resource
The AP's multi-topic structure has lent itself well to web portals, such as Yahoo, msn.com, etc, which all have news pages which constantly need to be updated. Often, such portals will rely on AP and other news services as their first source for news coverage of breaking news items. Yahoo's "Top News" page gives the AP top visibility out of any news outlet. This has been of major impact to the AP's public image and role, as it gives new credence to the AP's continual mission of having staff for covering every area of news fully and promptly. The AP is also the news service used on the Nintendo Wii's News Channel. In 2007 Google announced it was paying for Associated Press content displayed in Google News
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ap.org
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press
hosted.ap.org/dynamic/fronts/HOME?SITE=AP

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