Associated Press

NEW YORK, NEW YORK, USA·FOUNDED 1846·apnews.com

The Associated Press (AP) is a not-for-profit news cooperative founded in 1846, owned by its contributing U.S. newspaper and broadcast members.

Overview

The Associated Press (AP) is a not-for-profit news agency headquartered in New York City, operating as a cooperative, unincorporated association owned by its contributing U.S. newspaper and broadcast members. AP produces text, photo, video, audio and data news reports distributed to its members, international subscribers and commercial customers, and publishes the widely used AP Stylebook.

History

The Associated Press was formed in May 1846 by five daily New York City newspapers—organized by Moses Yale Beach, second publisher of The Sun, and joined by the New York Herald, the New York Courier and Enquirer, The Journal of Commerce and the New York Evening Express—to share the cost of transmitting news of the Mexican-American War. Melville Stone, who had founded the Chicago Daily News in 1875, served as AP General Manager from 1893 to 1921, a period during which the cooperative expanded its newsgathering operations nationally. In 1945, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Associated Press v. United States that AP bylaws restricting membership admission and prohibiting members from supplying news to non-member competitors violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, and enjoined the cooperative from continuing those restrictive membership practices.

Daisy Veerasingham was appointed AP's president and CEO effective January 1, 2022, succeeding the retiring Gary Pruitt. Veerasingham, who joined AP in 2004 as a sales director for AP Television News in London and most recently served as executive vice president and chief operating officer, became the first woman, first person of color and first person from outside the United States to lead the organization in its 175-year history. Steven R. Swartz, chairman and CEO of Hearst, chaired the AP Board of Directors at the time of her appointment.

Notable works

• May 4, 2026AP won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for a three-year investigation, by reporters Dake Kang, Garance Burke, Byron Tau and Aniruddha Ghosal with contributor Yael Grauer, into mass-surveillance tools developed with the help of American companies for China's government and the tools' newly documented use by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The project drew on open-records requests, congressional testimony, lobbying disclosures and leaked documents, and included a Freedom of Information Act request revealing that the U.S. government sought active counterterrorism cooperation with China even as Beijing broadly labeled protest or dissent among Uyghurs as terrorism.

• 2025AP staff won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting for coverage described by the Pulitzer Board as "fast, comprehensive and authoritative," and AP staff, working in collaboration with FRONTLINE and the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting the same year.

Key personnel

• President & CEODaisy Veerasingham

• Board ChairmanSteven R. Swartz

Audience

AP serves its member newspapers and broadcast stations in the United States, along with international subscribers and commercial customers worldwide. AP has stated that its news reaches more than half the world's population on a given day.

Membership Requirements

Per AP's own Stylebook Help Center, AP offers two membership types. Regular membership is available to printed newspapers published in the United States, most of which are dailies; regular members agree to contribute news to AP and are the only members entitled to vote in elections for the AP Board of Directors. Associate membership is available to daily newspapers, some weekly newspapers, and broadcast stations. Both regular and associate members receive AP news and photos and share in the cooperative's costs.

Location and contact info

HeadquartersNew York, New York

Websitehttps://apnews.com