Associated Press

The Associated Press is a news cooperative. By its own account it was founded in 1846 “as an independent news cooperative, whose members are U.S. newspapers and broadcasters,” and it describes itself as “independent, nonpartisan and accurate since 1846” and as “beholden only to the facts and the public interest.”

Operations

AP reports journalists in 230 locations across nearly 100 countries and in all 50 U.S. states. It supplies text, photography, video, graphics, audio and data to media customers and to non-media businesses, and publishes its own consumer site at apnews.com. It states that it publishes its news values and principles openly, and that these “guide all AP journalists.”

AP reports its own reach as “four billion people see AP journalism every day.” That is a self-reported figure and is not independently audited here.

Sourcing Note

The reach line “1,700 newspaper and broadcaster subscribers worldwide” is removed — AP’s about page gives no such number, and no other fetchable source does.

Two connections are removed: distributes-via edges to Twitter/X and Facebook, described as AP content being “integrated into Facebook news feeds and fact-checking.” Neither could be verified, and the Facebook description asserts a fact-checking arrangement for which there is no source.

Also removed as unsourceable: the description of AP as “the authoritative source for declaring election winners, with their calls widely accepted across the political and media spectrum”; the claims that AP content “automatically feeds into social media platforms, news aggregators, and mobile news applications” and “serves as a trusted news source for platform fact-checking systems and content moderation policies”; and the assertions that AP’s reporting “establish[es] the baseline narrative framework that other outlets build upon” and functions as “the institutional foundation of American political journalism.” AP’s election-calling operation is real and documented on its own site, but the characterizations of its influence are not sourceable and are not asserted in this project’s voice.