Associated Press

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. In 2007, Google announced that it was paying to receive AP content, to be displayed in Google News,[16] interrupted from late 2009 to mid-2010 due to a licensing dispute.[17][18]

A 2017 study by NewsWhip revealed that AP content was more engaged with on Facebook than content from any individual English-language publisher.[19]

• 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.[20]
• 1941: The AP expanded from print to radio broadcast news.
• 1941: Wide World News Photo Service purchased from The New York Times.[21]
• 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.[22]
• 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 lead to his eventual dismissal by the AP. Kennedy maintains that he reported only what German radio already had broadcast.
• 1951: AP war correspondent Prague bureau chief William N. Oatis was arrested for espionage by the Communist government of Czechoslovakia. He was not released until 1953.
• 1974: The AP launches the Associated Press Radio Network headquartered in Washington, D.C.
• 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.[20]
• 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.[23]
• 2008: The AP opens its Pyongyang bureau.[24]
• 2010: The AP launched multi-device World Cup Soccer Applications providing real-time news coverage of the 2010 World Cup on desktop, Apple and Android devices.
• 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.[25]
• 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.[26]
• 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.[27]
• 2016: The AP Reports 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.[28]
• 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.[29]

The AP began its Major League Baseball Manager of the Year Award in 1959, for a manager in each league.[42] From 1984 to 2000, the award was given to one manager in all of MLB.[43] The winners were chosen by a national panel of AP baseball writers and radio men. The award was discontinued in 2001.[42]

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.

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

In 1994, Tina Susman was on her fourth trip to Somalia, reporting for the AP. She was reporting on U.S. peacekeeping troops leaving the country. Somali rebels outnumbered her bodyguards in Mogadishu,[53] dragged her from her car in broad daylight,[54] and held her for 20 days. She told The Quill that she believes being a woman was an advantage in her experience there.[55] The AP had requested news organizations including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and The Washington Post to suppress the story to discourage the emboldening of the kidnappers.[54][56]

In September 2002, Washington, D.C. bureau reporter Christopher Newton, an AP reporter since 1994, was fired after he was accused of fabricating sources since 2000, including at least 40 people and organizations. Prior to his firing, Newton had been focused on writing about federal law-enforcement while based at the Justice Department. 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".[57]

In 2007, an FBI agent working in Seattle impersonated an AP journalist and infected the computer of a 15-year old suspect with a malicious surveillance software.[58][59] The incident sparked a strongly worded statement from the AP demanding the bureau never impersonate a member of the news media again.[60] In September 2016 the incident resulted in a report by the Justice Department, which the AP said "effectively condone[d] the FBI's impersonation".[61][62]

In December 2017, following a US court appearance, a judge ruled in favor of the AP in a lawsuit against the FBI for fraudulently impersonating a member of the news media.[63][64]

In August 2005, Ken Knight, a Louisiana photographer, sued the AP claiming that it had willfully and negligently violated Knight's copyright by distributing a photograph of celebrity Britney Spears to various media outlets including, but not limited to: truTV (formerly CourtTV), America Online and Fox News.[65] The case was settled in November 2006.

In a case filed February 2005, McClatchey v. The Associated Press, a Pennsylvania photographer sued the AP for cropping a picture to remove the plaintiff's embedded title and copyright notice and later distributed it to news organizations without the plaintiff's permission or credit. The parties settled.[66]

In June 2008, the AP sent numerous DMCA take down demands and threatened legal action against several blogs. The AP contended that the internet blogs were violating the AP's copyright by linking to AP material and using headlines and short summaries in those links. Many bloggers and experts noted that the use of the AP news fell squarely under commonly accepted internet practices and within fair-use standards.[67] Others noted and demonstrated that the AP routinely takes similar excerpts from other sources, often without attribution or licenses. The AP responded that it was defining standards regarding citations of AP news.[68]

In March 2009, the AP counter-sued artist Shepard Fairey over his famous image of Barack Obama, saying the uncredited, uncompensated use of an AP photo violated copyright laws and signaled a threat to journalism. Fairey had sued the AP the previous month over his artwork, titled "Obama Hope" and "Obama Progress", arguing that he did not violate copyright law because he dramatically changed the image. The artwork, based on an April 2006 picture taken for the AP by Mannie Garcia, was a popular image during the 2008 presidential election and now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. According to the AP lawsuit filed in federal court in Manhattan, Fairey knowingly "misappropriated The AP's rights in that image". The suit asked the court to award the AP profits made off the image and damages. Fairey said he looked forward to "upholding the free expression rights at stake here" and disproving the AP's accusations. In January 2011 this suit was settled with neither side declaring their position to be wrong but agreeing to share reproduction rights and profits from Fairey's work.[69]

In January 2008, the AP sued competitor All Headline News (AHN) claiming that AHN allegedly infringed on its copyrights and a contentious "quasi-property" right to facts.[70][71] The AP complaint asserted that AHN reporters had copied facts from AP news reports without permission and without paying a syndication fee. After AHN moved to dismiss all but the copyright claims set forth by the AP, a majority of the lawsuit was dismissed.[72] The case has been dismissed and both parties settled.[73]

In June 2010, the AP was accused[74] of having unfair and hypocritical policies after it was demonstrated that AP reporters had copied original reporting from the "Search Engine Land" website without permission, attribution, or credit.[75]

In April 2013, the AP stated that it had dropped the term "illegal immigrant" from its AP Stylebook. The AP followed ABC, NBC, and CNN in not using the term. Jose Antonio Vargas commended the AP for its decision.[76]

Syndicated writer Ruben Navarrette criticized the decision, stating the reasoning behind the decision was political correctness and called the AP's explanation "incomprehensible".[77] Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said of the decision, that she does not get involved in "vocabulary wars" and then stated "They are immigrants who are here illegally, that's an illegal immigrant."[78]

On April 23, 2013, the AP's Twitter account was hacked to release a hoax tweet about fictional attacks in the White House that left President Obama injured.[79]

On May 13, 2013, the AP announced telephone records for 20 of their reporters during a two-month period in 2012, had been subpoenaed by the U.S. Justice Department and described these acts as a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into news-gathering operations.[80][81] The AP reported that the Justice Department would not say why it sought the records, but sources stated that the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia's office was conducting a criminal investigation into a May 7, 2012 AP story about a CIA operation that prevented a terrorist plot to detonate an explosive device on a commercial flight.[82] The DOJ did not direct subpoenas to the AP, instead going to their phone providers, including Verizon Wireless.[83] U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder testified under oath in front of the House Judiciary Committee that he recused himself from the leak investigations to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest. Holder said his Deputy Attorney General, James M. Cole, was in charge of the AP investigation and would have ordered the subpoenas.[84]

In January 2020, Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate criticized AP for cropping her out of a photo taken at the World Economic Forum that featured her with fellow activists Greta Thunberg, Luisa Neubauer, Isabelle Axelsson, and Loukina Tille. She said in a video uploaded to her Twitter account that it was an example of how non-white voices were being "erased" from the conversation on climate change, and later told BuzzFeed News that she was hurt by their decision. Thunberg and Axelsson also criticized AP for cropping her out.[85][86] AP later replaced the edit with the original, and issued an apology for the error.[87] Director of Photography David Ake said the initial decision to crop the photo was because of tight deadlines, and for composition reasons.[86]

The AP gave the Nazi regime access to its photo archives for its antisemitic propaganda.[88][89] AP also cooperated with the Nazi regime through censorship.[90][91]

Investigators (chiefly Norman Domeier of the University of Vienna) have in recent years brought to wider attention the deal between the AP and the German government related to the interchange of press photos during the period in which the United States was at war with Germany. This relationship involved the Bureau Laux, run by the photographer Helmut Laux.[92]

The mechanism for this interchange was that a courier flew to Lisbon and back each day transporting photos from and for Germany's wartime enemy, the US, via diplomatic pouch. The transactions were initially conducted at the AP bureau under Luiz Lupi in Lisbon, and from 1944, when the exchange via Lisbon took too long, also at the AP bureau in Stockholm under Eddie Shanke. Here, as a cover, the Swedish agency, Pressens Bild, was involved as an intermediary. An estimated 40,000 photos were exchanged between the enemies in this way.[93]

The AP in 2017 published an extensive report of its dealings with Germany before and during World War II. The AP conducted an in-depth review of its operations in Nazi Germany, concluding that the news agency acted as "forthrightly and independently as possible." The review also found that the AP handled some situations inadequately.

The AP review was undertaken following an article that claimed the AP allowed Nazi propagandists to exert some influence over its news photo report in the 1930s by maintaining a photo subsidiary in Germany, registered under a restrictive Nazi press law. The AP's review disputed the claim that the news agency was in any way complicit with the Nazi regime during the years 1933–41, when the agency was present in the country. The AP was kicked out of Germany when the United States entered World War II in December 1941.

"We recognize that AP should have done some things differently during this period, for example protesting when AP photos were exploited by the Nazis for propaganda within Germany and refusing to employ German photographers with active political affiliations and loyalties," the report said." However, suggestions that the AP at any point sought to help the Nazis or their heinous cause are simply wrong."

In his book Broken Spring: An American-Israeli Reporter's Close-up View of How Egyptians Lost Their Struggle for Freedom, former AP correspondent Mark Lavie claimed that the editorial line of the Cairo bureau was that the conflict was Israel's fault and the Arabs and Palestinians were blameless.[94][95][96] Israeli journalist Matti Friedman accused the AP of killing a story he wrote about the "war of words", "between Israel and its critics in human rights organizations", in the aftermath of the Israel/Gaza conflict of 2008–09.[94]

On September 29, 2000, the first day of the Second Intifada, the AP sent out of a photograph of a badly bloodied young man behind whom a police officer could be seen with a baton raised in a menacing fashion; a gas station with Hebrew lettering could also be seen in the background.[97][98][99][100] The AP labelled it with the caption "An Israeli policeman and a Palestinian on the Temple Mount", and the picture and caption were subsequently published in several major American newspapers, including the New York Times and the Boston Globe.[97][98][99][100] In reality, the injured man in the photograph was a Jewish yeshiva student from Chicago named Tuvia Grossman, and the police officer, a Druze named Gidon Tzefadi, was protecting Grossman from a Palestinian mob who had clubbed, stoned, and stabbed Grossman.[97][98][99][100] There are also no gas stations with Hebrew lettering on the Temple Mount.[97][98][99][100]

The episode is often cited by those who accuse the media of having an anti-Israel bias, and was the impetus for the founding of HonestReporting.[100][101][102][103][104] After a letter from Grossman's father noted the error, the AP, the New York Times, and other papers published corrections; despite these corrections, the photograph continues to be used by critics of Israel as a symbol of Israeli aggression and violence.[97][99][100][105]

During the 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis, the Israeli army destroyed the al-Jalaa Highrise, a building housing the AP's Gaza offices and Al Jazeera offices. Israel stated that the building housed Hamas military intelligence and had given advanced warning of the strike, and no civilians were harmed.[106][107] AP CEO Gary Pruitt released a statement on May 16, stating that he "had no indication Hamas was in the building" and called on the Israeli government to provide the evidence. He said that "the world will know less about what is happening in Gaza because of what happened today."[108]

On 17 May, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he had not seen any evidence that Hamas operated from the building housing the AP and Al Jazeera, but it is the job of others to handle intelligence matters. Israel reportedly shared intelligence with American officials and U.S President Biden showing Hamas offices inside the building.[109] Journalist Matti Friedman also supported the Israeli government's claim.[110]

Reporters Without Borders asked the International Criminal Court to investigate the bombing as a possible war crime.[111]

On June 8, Israeli Ambassador to the US Gilad Erdan met with AP CEO Gary Pruitt and vice president for foreign news, Ian Phillips, to discuss the operation. In coordination with the IDF, Erdan said the site was used by Hamas intelligence officials to develop and carry out SIGINT and electronic warfare operations, targeting both IDF and civilian systems in Israel, including devices to disrupt the Iron Dome.[112] Erdan also said the Israeli government does not believe the AP was aware of the Hamas presence because it was a secret unit. He said the Israeli government was willing to help rebuild the AP's offices and ensure they will be able to bring equipment into Gaza.[113]

In May 2021, the AP said it would launch a review of its social media policies after questions were raised about the firing of a journalist who expressed pro-Palestinian views on social media. The announcement came after some AP journalists signed a letter expressing concern over the termination of former news associate Emily Wilder, whom the AP said committed multiple violations of the company's social media policy. Wilder was the target of a right-wing online harassment campaign for her activism while at Stanford University. The AP has said that Wilder's previous activism played no role in her termination.[114]

On 10 January 2022, AP announced it would start selling non-fungible tokens (NFTs) of their photographs in partnership with a company named Xooa , with the proceeds being used to fund their operations.[115] One of the NFTs they promoted on Twitter on 24 February was an aerial shot depicting an overcrowded migrant boat in the Mediterranean Sea. The tweet received negative backlash from users and other journalists, with AP being accusing of profiting off of human suffering and the picture choice being "dystopian" and "in extremely poor taste". The tweet was subsequently deleted and the NFT, which was to be sold the next day, was pulled from market. Global director of media relations Lauren Easton apologized, saying "This was a poor choice of imagery for an NFT. It has not and will not be put up for auction [...] AP's NFT marketplace is a very early pilot program, and we are immediately reviewing our efforts".[116][117]