Premier News Service : The AP: It’s Everywhere and Powerful

Several years ago, Marty Thompson was making a routine call on Jack Moorhead, publisher of The Union, a 20,000-circulation daily newspaper that serves the Grass Valley and Nevada City communities of Northern California.

Thompson, now the Associated Press bureau chief in Los Angeles, was then the AP bureau chief in San Francisco, and--like other AP bureau chiefs--he periodically visits each AP member newspaper and broadcast outlet in his area, trying to make sure that the giant news-gathering agency is meeting its individual members’ basic news and photo needs.

On that day in Grass Valley, Thompson was startled to hear Moorhead say that he was not sure AP was worth what he paid for it.

AP is the largest news agency in the Free World--a network of more than 300 news and photo bureaus, with an audience of 1 billion people a day in 112 different countries.

But AP’s unique strength is that it is a nonprofit news cooperative, owned by its 1,416 member daily newspapers and about 6,000 member broadcast outlets throughout the United States. Member papers like The Union (and The Times) send copies of their stories to AP, generally by computer; AP rewrites many of these stories and transmits them to its members (and to subscriber news organizations abroad), along with the stories and photos provided by AP’s own staff in the United States and 70 foreign countries.

When one publisher--even the publisher of a small paper--begins to mutter about quitting AP, AP starts to worry. Several such defections could leave the agency with troublesome holes in its blanket coverage of the world, and it is that blanket coverage--news and photos of everything from high school basketball in the Midwest to terrorism in the Mideast--that AP members pay for.

Measured the Stories

Thus, curious and a bit uneasy about Moorhead’s complaint, Thompson bought a copy of that day’s Union, walked to a nearby coffee shop, whipped out a ruler and started measuring and calculating.

What did he find?

The stories and photographs provided by AP filled about 65% of The Union’s total news space--for which The Union paid AP an annual fee that amounted to about 11% of the paper’s total news and editorial budget.

Thompson showed his numbers to Moorhead.

Moorhead stayed with AP.

Through the years, many other publishers and editors have made the same decision, generally for the same reason: In a world in which editors and publishers are increasingly cost-conscious, AP remains a remarkable journalistic bargain.

The calculations Thompson performed in Grass Valley could be repeated in cities large and small throughout the country, with similar results. That is why AP has become the backbone of the nation’s system of news-gathering and dissemination, serving 84% of the nation’s daily newspapers, representing 96% of the nation’s daily newspaper circulation.

Although major metropolitan newspapers use a much smaller percentage of AP stories than do papers with far less circulation, even the largest papers rely on AP, not only for stories and photos but for financial tables and for reams of sports results and other information that AP transmits to members and subscribers daily over its intricate network of computers, high-speed printers, laser photo machines and communications satellites.

On a day chosen at random last month, the Los Angeles Times published 14 AP stories and nine AP pictures, as well as seven pages of stock market tables and other financial data and two pages of sports scores, standings and statistics, virtually all provided by the AP. AP stories also served as the basis for numerous one- and two-paragraph stories in the news digests published in five different sections of that day’s Times, and The Times used AP delegate counts in its stories on both the Democratic and Republican presidential races.

Cost to Members Varies

For all this material, The Times pays AP about $1.2 million a year--approximately 1.6% of its total editorial budget--as compared, say, to the $45,000 paid to AP by The Union in Grass Valley. (AP charges are based on newspaper circulation and on which of the many AP services a given paper takes.)

The growth of television has diminished the impact of wire services and newspapers alike in recent years, but AP remains a powerful force. People get news directly from AP in stories ripped and read from AP wires at radio stations and in stories with the (AP) logo or “By Associated Press” or “From the Associated Press” credit line in newspapers, and they also get news indirectly from AP in countless other newspaper, radio and television stories every day that incorporate (or begin with tips from) stories written by AP reporters.

AP is so ubiquitous that Mark Twain once said, “There are only two forces that can carry light to all corners of the globe--the sun in the heavens and the Associated Press down here.”

Oliver Gramling, in his 1940 book “AP: The Story of News,” quotes Mahatma Gandhi has having made a similar observation when he was released from prison late one night in 1932 at a remote railway station in western India and found an AP reporter waiting for him.

“I suppose,” Gandhi said, “when I go to the Hereafter and stand at the Golden Gate, the first person I shall meet will be a correspondent of the Associated Press.”

Many More Bureaus

AP has more than twice as many domestic and foreign bureaus as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post combined, so even on major stories that these papers ultimately cover with their own reporters, AP is often on the scene first, covering for virtually everyone until other media outlets can get their people there.

“AP . . . stands head and shoulders above everybody else,” said Malcolm Browne of the New York Times, who won a Pulitzer Prize covering Vietnam for AP in 1964. “It may not have all of the news about every subject, but as a general, panoramic cover of the world news, it’s pretty hard to beat.”

The steady decline of AP’s longtime rival, United Press International, has increased media reliance on AP in recent years.

In AP bureaus everywhere, reporters and editors still scrutinize the daily play log, produced at AP headquarters in New York, showing which among a select group of papers used AP, UPI or their own, staff-written stories on the major events of the day, but AP consistently wins these battles nowadays.

UPI, which has not turned a profit since 1963, has changed hands twice in less than two years--and three times in six years--and it has recently been losing about $2 million a month. The UPI staff, reduced by almost 200 in late 1987 and early 1988, will shrink by another 150 positions this year, UPI officials said Wednesday in announcing a new, two-year plan to try to save the wire service.

Impact, Reputation Suffer

All the cutbacks and turmoil at UPI have greatly reduced not only its size and scope but also its impact and its reputation.

“You just can’t rely on UPI anymore to provide coverage of major stories of the day,” said Joe Farah, executive editor of the Glendale News-Press, one of fewer than a dozen of California’s 128 daily papers to take UPI and not AP.

Farah said his paper will switch to AP when its contract expires next year. Several other news organizations--including the New York Times--have already quit UPI.

Although the deterioration of UPI has been accompanied by--and, to some extent has been caused by--the rise of supplemental wire services offered by the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post, New York Times and Knight-Ridder, among others, none of these services provide the kind of daily, meat-and-potatoes reporting from every state capital and every high school basketball arena that editors have long relied on from AP and UPI.

Some editors worry that if UPI ultimately abandons such reporting--or goes out of business--AP will not be as responsive or as responsible as it has been with UPI there as a constant competitor.

‘Losing Their Edge’

Rich Oppel, editor of the Charlotte Observer, said he has already sensed that AP state bureaus have become “a little slower to move, more reliant on members . . . more bureaucratic, losing their edge a little . . . as UPI has dissipated.”

Such perceptions are difficult to measure, but after winning 16 Pulitzer Prizes for reporting from 1922 to 1966, AP has won only three since then--and only one since 1978.

AP’s generally excellent reputation notwithstanding, it is far from flawless, and not all (or even most) of those flaws can be attributed to diminished competition from UPI.

Critics say that too much AP writing is bland and unimaginative, too few AP stories take real risks, either journalistically, politically or stylistically, and too many AP bureaus in this country and abroad spend too much time rewriting stories from the local papers and not enough time doing their own reporting. (Even in the Los Angeles bureau--AP’s second largest, after Washington, with 44 reporters, editors and photographers--about 60% of the stories are rewrites from local papers, said Marty Thompson, the bureau chief.)

In addition, AP lore is filled with tales of specific mistakes, misstatements, embarrassments and oversights.

Kennedy Assassination

When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, AP trailed UPI badly in the early reporting and also ran “an unconfirmed report” that Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson had been shot (not true), a story that said “a Secret Service agent and a Dallas policeman were shot and killed . . . some distance from the area where . . . Kennedy was assassinated” (not true) and another story that said Kennedy had been shot “in the front of the head” (not true).

These erroneous reports contributed significantly to the ensuing flood tide of rumors that the assassination had been an elaborate conspiracy, involving a second gunman, and that official investigations of the assassination were “fraudulent,” William Manchester wrote in his 1967 book “The Death of a President.”

“All afternoon, the Associated Press was a source of misleading and inaccurate reports,” Manchester wrote. “The erratic performance of the Associated Press was responsible for much of the confusion (that followed the assassination).”

As mortified as AP was by its performance in Dallas, that was neither its first nor its last such stumble.

The AP reporter covering dedication ceremonies at the Civil War battlefield in Gettysburg, Pa., in 1863, was so unimpressed with President Abraham Lincoln’s address that he quoted not a word of it in his story and reported only: “The President also spoke.”

More recently--in separate incidents, 15 years apart--AP incorrectly reported that both James Meredith, the civil rights activist, and James Brady, President Reagan’s press secretary, had been killed by assassins. Both men survived. (AP also initially--and erroneously--reported that Reagan was “not harmed.”)

In 1982--on the same day (and this time accompanied by UPI and Reuters)--AP incorrectly reported that Princess Grace had survived a car accident and was “resting uncomfortably with a broken thigh” and that Bashir Gemayel, president-elect of Lebanon, had “escaped unharmed” from an explosion at the Falangist Party headquarters in East Beirut. Both the Princess and the president-elect were killed that day--just as U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold was killed in a plane crash in 1961, despite AP’s report that he had landed safely at his destination.

Byproduct of Zeal

Such mistakes are often the inevitable byproduct of the zeal to be first--a drive that galvanizes most reporters but that becomes an absolute obsession with wire service reporters.

“On the biggest of stories,” writes the AP’s Mort Rosenblum in “Coups and Earthquakes,” an agency (wire service) man endures shame if he trails his competitor by seconds.”

Because a wire service provides stories for both morning and afternoon newspapers, in virtually every time zone in the world, some member newspaper somewhere is always on deadline; wire service reporters thus feel that they must rush their stories onto the wire so that editors will have them in time to publish them--and, preferably, have them before they have stories on the same subjects from competing wire services.

It’s not surprising that this unremitting pressure to be first has, on occasion, undermined AP’s determined commitment to accuracy. In fact, given the enormous volume of material that AP produces, often under extreme deadline pressure, it’s surprising there aren’t more such errors.

But the increasing complexity of the news, the diminished competitive presence of UPI and the growth of the electronic media--especially Cable News Network’s 24-hour service--have combined in recent years to make being first somewhat less important than it once was. AP, although by no means surrendering that franchise, has nonetheless changed accordingly--and dramatically.

AP still wants to be first in everything, of course, and last summer, AP broke a story on a New York congressman using campaign funds to pay his personal legal expenses; 16 days later, AP broke a story on a government pay bonus for a CIA official accused of ordering illegal weapons drops to Nicaraguan Contras; just last month, AP was first on a story about a study by the Major League Baseball Players Assn. showing that players lost up to $90 million in salaries in 1986-87 because of collusion by team owners.

But the news that readers, listeners and viewers now receive under the AP imprimatur--like the news provided by the better newspapers--is far broader, deeper and more varied than the get-it-first, who-what-when-where accounts of disasters, wars, games and elections that long served as typical wire service reportage.

AP also has a newsfeatures staff, an enterprise staff and a regional reporting team, and the stories these writers (and others) produce range from features on presidential speech writers and a black publishing company in South Africa to a five-part series on education for the disabled and such massive efforts as a 38-part, 40,000-word Vietnam retrospective.

All this is very different from the modest project envisioned by the six New York newspaper publishers who founded the first Associated Press, a precursor of the present-day AP, in 1848.

These publishers banded together, in large measure, because they realized that they could save money if they sent one reporter in one boat--instead of six reporters in six boats--to meet the European ships steaming to the East Coast with news from the Old World.

In the beginning, AP’s annual expenses were less than $20,000; the budget this year is $275 million--more than the combined editorial budgets of the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post.

The daily AP news report rarely totaled more than several hundred words in the early days; now AP transmits an estimated 4 million words a day--the equivalent of about 40 novels. A computer printout of the stories AP transmits to member newspapers on its national, high-speed wire in a single day weighs about 10 pounds--and that does not include the thousands of stories AP transmits on each of its intrastate wires and on its broadcast, sports, financial and other special wires.

The most obvious changes at AP in recent years have been technological. Early AP reporters sometimes used carrier pigeons, native runners and the Pony Express to transmit the news. Later, they used the wireless telegraph. Now they use computers and satellites.

As recently as the early 1970s, AP transmitted its stories to members at 66 words a minute; now most AP copy flashes toward its destination at 1,200 words a minute. By the end of the year, the rate will jump to 9,600 words a minute for most papers.

As a companion service to this high-speed transmission of stories, AP--which began transmitting photos in 1935--is in the process of installing a new photo system that will reduce from 10 minutes to 1 minute the time it takes to transmit a photo. AP’s new PhotoStream system will link up with “electronic darkrooms” at many papers; this digital process will enable newspaper editors to “edit photos”--adjusting size, shape, contrast and color--on a computer screen and then send the photos from one department to another and on to production, much as they now edit and send stories.

Modern technology has also helped AP broaden its franchise. AP started as a service exclusively for newspapers, but the number of daily newspapers has been dwindling in recent years, and the broadcast media have been growing. Although some members of the AP board of directors initially resisted making AP available to radio or television, AP now serves both--and has its own radio network of 1,000 stations.

AP’s broadcast members and subscribers now provide about 20% of AP’s total income. Newspapers, which provided 65% of AP’s income 20 years ago, now provide only 47%. (The balance of AP’s income comes from a joint venture with Dow Jones that provides financial news to subscribers worldwide and from leasing AP’s satellite communications network to various clients.)

But the most far-reaching changes in AP have been journalistic, not technological or financial.

Some AP staffers--and some newspaper editors--see these changes as brand new, but they have been more evolutionary than revolutionary.

Kent Cooper first called for a “new definition of what news is important” in 1925, at the beginning of his 23-year tenure as general manager of AP. AP, he said then, must go beyond “the basic news of affairs of state, commerce and politics . . . (to) develop special writers” who would cover science, medicine, entertainment, labor and religion. Cooper also introduced regular human-interest feature stories--”news . . . about people”--to the AP wire.

In the 1960s, the cataclysmic changes that shook American society triggered another, even greater broadening of horizons at AP (and at other news organizations as well).

By then, the chief executive at AP was Wes Gallagher, a gruff, crew-cut, bushy-browed former war correspondent who pushed, prodded and growled his way to the top of AP--and demanded that his subordinates keep AP on top as well.

Gallagher, who ran the AP from 1962 until he retired in 1976, was as widely admired as he was feared, and when he proposed new concepts for the definition and coverage of news, AP staffers responded. Gallagher was not just the boss--although he never left any doubt he was that--he was a reporter himself, someone who looked carefully at (and often commented caustically on) the AP news report every day, even when he was president of the organization.

Under Gallagher, AP created one team of reporters that specialized in energy issues, a second that covered urban affairs and a third (dubbed the “Mod Squad”) that traveled around the country doing stories on the rapidly changing life styles of the young and the restive. Gallagher also created a Special Assignment Team, an aggressive, Washington-based investigative unit (described by one colleague as “10 sons of bitches with table manners”) that produced an impressive string of stories on government corruption, malfeasance and inefficiency.

Not everyone was pleased with the changes Gallagher and his successors wrought in AP.

Otis Chandler, now chairman of the executive committee of Times Mirror, was a member of the AP board of directors from 1965 to 1974 when he was publisher of The Times, and he recalls his tenure as a “watershed-type period . . . a tumultuous time, (with) much conflict.”

Chandler said that some senior members of the AP board opposed thorough coverage of the major issues of the 1960s and were equally resistant to the enterprise and investigative reporting that he, Gallagher, Louis D. Boccardi (then managing editor, now president and general manager of AP) and a few other, younger board members thought essential.

This resistance notwithstanding, Chandler said, AP improved greatly in those years, from being “a good ol’ boys organization,” with many “second-rate people,” into a “much sharper, more alert and more useful” news-gathering organization.

But AP slipped badly on at least three major stories during that time, and many see those slips as revealing.

When Peter Arnett, who had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1966 while covering Vietnam for AP, subsequently wrote about American soldiers raping and looting in Cambodian villages, Gallagher had the material excised from the story.

That was “a stupid decision,” Gallagher says now.

AP made a different mistake on the My Lai massacre of more than 100 South Vietnamese men, women and children in 1968. After publishing the first (brief) reference to an investigation of the massacre, AP then “bungled” the story, Gallagher said, and did not follow up.

Seymour Hersh, an ex-AP reporter, did follow up--and won a Pulitzer Prize for his efforts.

Then, in 1972, AP broke the first major story on Watergate, disclosing that James McCord, one of the men who broke into Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate complex, was the security coordinator for the Committee for the Re-election of the President. It was this revelation that ultimately linked the Nixon White House to the break-in.

But that was about the last story of any consequence that AP broke on Watergate. Throughout most of the scandal, AP was largely content to quote what other news organizations reported--primarily the work of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in the Washington Post.

Most other news organizations except the Post were also weak on Watergate, but many past and present AP staffers say that AP’s performance on the Watergate, My Lai and Cambodian stories is symptomatic of a fundamental problem that continues today.

Yes, AP has advanced far beyond the routine reportage of its early years; but critics inside and outside AP say there are still some kinds of stories that AP is not comfortable doing. Stories that challenge the White House and make America look bad in the eyes of the world are, they say, among them.

Are the critics right?

ASSOCIATED PRESS OPERATIONSNews and/or photo bureaus, U.S. 187

News and/or photo bureaus, abroad 121

News/photo employees, U.S. 1,106

News/photo employees, abroad 480

Number daily, English-language newspaper members, U.S. 1,416

Number non-daily, foreign language and college papers, U.S. 230

Radio/television stations taking AP 6,000

Foreign news outlets taking AP 8,500

Number countries served by AP 112

1988 AP Budget $275 million

Tom Lutgen of The Times editorial library assisted with the research for this story.

FO(Bulldog Edition) Seymour Hersh,The ex-AP reporter followed up on My Lai, won a Pulitzer.