Associated Press, in new book, examines its history

By: ERIN McCLAM - Associated Press | Saturday, June 30, 2007 7:49 PM PDT ∞

NEW YORK ---- In a neglected vault buried under New York's Rockefeller Center ---- a hot and musty space with little space between rows of rusted-shut file cabinets ---- The Associated Press found pieces of history.

The unearthing of thousands of documents, fragments of the 161-year history of the news cooperative, led to the publication of a new history of the AP ---- the first since the outbreak of World War II.

"Breaking News: How The Associated Press Has Covered War, Peace and Everything Else" tells the stories behind AP's documentation of world events since 1846, from James K. Polk to George W. Bush, the Civil War to Iraq.

"These are the stories of the storytellers," said Valerie Komor, director of AP's corporate archives, who has led an effort to centralize and organize the papers and artifacts that tell the news agency's story.

The papers were retrieved from storage space under 50 Rockefeller Plaza, the AP's headquarters from 1938 until 2004, when the cooperative moved to 450 W. 33rd St.

The notion of an updated book emerged as the AP began sifting through its own history ---- interoffice memos, correspondence between its main office and bureaus, letters from newspaper members.

"As we began to dig into this, we discovered how big the treasure chest was," said Tom Curley, AP's president and CEO.

The 432-page result, published by Princeton Architectural Press, traces a history of the United States and the world, from Custer's defeat at the hands of the Sioux to the stories that define modern life.

The book was written by current and former Associated Press reporters and editors, and is illustrated with nearly 200 classic photos.

It is populated by characters like Joseph I. Gilbert, who approached Abraham Lincoln after he delivered the Gettysburg Address on Nov. 19, 1863, asked the president whether he could borrow the document, and wrote it up for the AP.

And Kathryn Johnson, of the AP's Atlanta bureau, who cooked meals in the home of Martin Luther King Jr. during the days after his 1968 slaying, filing dispatches for AP on the family's mourning ---- part of years covering the civil rights movement.

"We wanted the book to be a general interest book as much as possible," said Kelly Smith Tunney, a former AP vice president who, before her retirement, coordinated the efforts to expand the agency's archives and update its oral histories.

"We wanted to define the book in a way that would allow us to tell a moving story about how we do our business, and yet make it interesting, make a narrative out of it," she said.

Still, Curley himself noted in the preface to "Breaking News" that AP's effort since 2003 to unearth more of its own past turned up some unattractive snippets of history. During the civil rights era, for example, newspaper editors had pressured the AP to scratch the courtesy title "Mrs." before the names of black women.

Among other chapters, the book includes examinations of how the AP has covered sports, elections, aviation and disasters ---- including AP's description of the World Trade Center site as "ground zero" in an early-afternoon report on Sept. 11, 2001.

The foreword was contributed by Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Halberstam, who was killed in a car crash in California in April. He wrote admiringly of the AP reporters who covered the Vietnam War.

Since the last comprehensive history of the AP, Oliver Gramling's 1940 "AP: The Story of News," two other substantial projects had been mounted ---- one in the 1970s and one in the 1980s ---- but neither was published.

"The other books had been sort of chronological ---- start at the beginning, go to the end," said Walter R. Mears, who reported for the AP for a half-century, helped lead the project and contributed a "brief history" of the cooperative for the book.

"It was my thinking that where they failed to grab attention and become what they hoped they would be, it was too much about the organization and not enough about the stories, since the interesting thing about the AP is what we cover," Mears said.

Among the finds as AP delved into its own history, a collection of 19th-century documents revealed the cooperative was actually two years older than commonly believed, dating to 1846 rather than 1848.

The documents showed that an owner-publisher of the original New York Sun had offered to share news of the Mexican-American War with rival newspapers ---- a cooperative that ultimately evolved into the AP.

As the updated history of AP hits bookshelves, its corporate archives are more carefully tended today, set among row after row of cabinets in an antiseptic, climate-controlled chamber below the AP's new headquarters.

Curley said that the archives initiative and book show that while news technology has shifted, repeatedly and tumultuously, since the 19th century, the critical mission of what journalists do has remained the same.

"The need to speak truth to power, the need to ask tough questions, the need to put half an idea with half of a tip together to figure out what really happened, that takes special work and special commitment," he said.

He added: "To see that that has endured over more than a century and a half was actually inspiring, especially in this moment of great media change."

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