Mr. Associated Press: How 20th-century journalism titan Kent Cooper transformed the news industry

• In scores of AP bureaus and thousands of newsrooms around the world, the printers that hammered out the news fell silent.
• Almost a century after Cooper became AP’s general manager, what can we learn from his career and the development of the institution he led?
• And what does it tell us about how journalism — including the international news system — evolved during the mid-20th century?

Human-interest news

• First, driven by competition with the United Press, AP’s great rival, Cooper loosened the strictures that made AP news colourless and dull (even if widely recognized for its accuracy and impartiality).
• Editors of AP member newspapers were turning to the livelier and breezier (and, according to some AP supporters, less accurate) stories provided by UP.
• “If one man fails to file a story of a millionairess marrying a poor factory hand because that man understands such a story is not properly A.P.

Moving beyond North America

• The second major change — one that Cooper spent more than 15 years fighting for — was loosening restrictions that prevented AP from distributing news outside North America.
• These restrictions were a product of AP’s earlier reliance on the British agency Reuters and its allies for almost all its international news.
• While many AP directors considered the Reuters connection an essential foundation of AP’s dominance of the U.S. newspaper market, Cooper insisted AP could succeed on its own.
• By 1945, his campaign had succeeded: AP was poised to sell North American-style news everywhere in the world with virtually no restrictions.

Embracing technology

• He also pioneered the development of same-day news photography by wire, permanently changing daily journalism’s repertoire of storytelling methods.
• Before the advent of AP’s Wirephoto, photographs were delivered by mail, train or airplane, often taking days to reach their destination.

Commitment to facts and accuracy

• One thing that Cooper did not change was AP’s commitment to factual accuracy and political neutrality — a rejection of the virulent partisanship that dominated U.S. journalism for most of the 19th century, and that is now returning.
• On the factual side, few things caused him, and AP, more grief than high-profile errors.
• Such errors led to immediate investigations of what had gone wrong, embarrassed and apologetic corrections, and severe consequences including firing of those responsible.