Breaking News: How the Associated Press has Covered War, Peace, and Everything Else Book

The reporter who filed the last dispatch before falling with Custer at his "last stand" against the Sioux. The Honolulu bureau chief who looked up from his breakfast table to see Japanese planes flying low and called San Francisco, managing to dictate a single paragraph before all communications to the mainland were cut. The Saigon bureau chief who served Coca-Cola and pound cake to three North Vietnamese soldiers before writing the bulletin announcing the fall of Saigon. These are but a few of the gripping and dramatic stories reported first by the Associated Press in the past century and a half.

In How the Associated Press Has Covered War, Peace, and Everything Else, the Associated Press throws open its archives and invites readers into its news bureaus and out into the field to witness first hand its groundbreaking reporting on presidents, elections, wars, civil rights, trials and crimes, disasters, business, and major sports events. The book conveys, through personal accounts, archival materials, interviews, and Pulitzer-Prize-winning photographs, how the AP became the world's largest news organization and how it continues to play a vital role in providing the news to the American and international press. Breaking News makes an original and significant contribution to journalism history by shedding light on the nation's primary newswire service, one that reaches one half of the world daily and upon which virtually every serious newspaper and broadcast outlet in the nation has relied for decades.

Joel W. Tscherne - Library Journal

With its long history of news gathering, the Associated Press (AP) has covered just about every major event for over 150 years. In this collection of 12 essays, AP reporters review many of the stories delivered over that period. In short, this is not a history of the AP so much as a history of how it has covered history as it happened. The chapters are arranged thematically, e.g., there are two chapters covering wars, one on famous trials, and one on sports, with the most interesting chapters reviewing freedom of the press and AP involvement in the relevant cases (e.g., its resistance to an order to erase a recording of a 2004 Antonin Scalia speech). Each essay is heavily illustrated with AP photos and uses texts from actual AP news reports. The essays discuss how the AP covered each event, as well as how the reporters interacted with their editors. Most of the topics are covered briefly and generally (the Civil War's six pages here represent one of the longer focuses), yet overall there is a great deal of information here. The book also features a foreword by David Halberstam, as well as a glossary of wire service terms and a brief history of the company. The essays are heavily endnoted to original news stories as well as some secondary sources. A valuable source for those wishing to learn about journalism and its reckoning with history as it happens; recommended for public and undergraduate libraries.