The Associated Press (AP) celebrates its 175th birthday in 2021. To mark this milestone, the AP Corporate Archives has assembled a concise visual history of the organization, offered here in an eight-part monthly blog, “AP at 175.” This is the eighth and final installment.

Valerie S. Komor
Director, AP Corporate Archives

As we mark the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we cannot fail to notice how newsgathering has been transformed in just two decades. In 2001, we did not yet have Blackberries; we had flip phones, the first mobile phones on the market. There was no Facebook. No Twitter. Google was three years old in 2001. In the newsroom, reporters composed their stories on Reporters Workbench, a novel system that also served as a searchable repository of AP stories dating back to 1985. Dot Matrix printers were still in use.

Digital photography was continuously improving in picture quality. The biggest changes, as we mentioned in our last post, came in video, mainly out of London, where AP created a broadcast archive in response to the growing desire of customers and their audiences to see news unfold live – and the dawn of the third millennium on January 1, 2000 provided a historically memorable moment. As did 9/11. That tragedy may have signaled the beginning of 24/7 live news coverage.

The protocols that established the Internet in 1989 were created through peer collaboration.  Decades on, the Internet itself has engendered collaboration on a scale unforeseen by its founders.  That kind of collaboration has become second nature within AP, as the tools of innovation, such as open source applications, are themselves based on the idea of collaborating to find solutions. And journalists, no matter what format they work in, are increasingly deployed in teams to allow multiple stories to unfold within a single report. Social media can lengthen the lives of stories but also complicate the work of unbiased reporting.

We are in the era of Big Data. And one of the challenges for journalism is how to manage and interpret big data sets--accumulations of data that are too large for traditional data processing applications.  AP has responded by creating a Data Journalism team composed of reporters, software developers, front-end programmers, and statisticians who can query these data sets and unearth stories that could not have been written even 10 years ago.  Much of this work is done for members who want in depth coverage of local issues but lack the resources for it.   

In the same vein, we are harnessing data to understand election results.  AP Vote Cast, which made its debut during the November 2018 midterms, is the result of a decade of research in collaboration with the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago. It is now the standard survey of the American electorate, conducted online and by telephone, designed to power AP’s race calls on election night and explain why the winners win.  This year, AP has embarked on a multi-year project to replace all election systems and workflows and pivot to a data-centric business. The first major milestone will be tabulating the 2022 midterms.

Yet another focus of newsroom innovation is the use of artificial intelligence in news gathering, production and distribution.  While we may not yet know how to build machines that are as intelligent as we are, AP is already using AI to automate workflows.  Our foray into artificial intelligence began in 2014, when the Business News desk began automating stories about corporate earnings. Prior to using AI, editors and reporters spent valuable resources on important but repetitive coverage that took time away from more high impact stories.   

At AP, a culture of innovation grew up very early and quickly became indispensable to AP’s mission. Over the years, some of the most ingenious minds have been drawn here, to harness the telegraph, to design faster teletypes, to perfect Wirephoto, and to produce HD video from unexplored depths of ocean.  And in 2003, AP established the first formal corporate archives, and with it, the means to document AP’s extraordinary legacy of innovation. For such technological leaps have not been undertaken for their own sake but for the sake of the journalism, often produced at great personal risk.  It is what has always set AP innovation apart. 

Text and photo editing by Valerie Komor.