Allen Podcast: Kent Cooper’s Associated Press

For the 136th episode of the Journalism History podcast, Gene Allen, professor emeritus at Toronto Metropolitan University, charts the career of Kent Cooper, who joined the Associated Press in 1910 before climbing the ranks and becoming its executive director. Allen describes how Cooper expanded the AP’s overseas operations and fended off competing wire services such as the United Press during his more than four decades with the AP. 

Transcript 

Gene Allen: When he came to AP in 1910, it was the dominant news agency in the United States. By the time he left in 1951, it was well on its way to being the dominant news agency in the world.

Ken Ward: Welcome to Journalism History, a podcast that rips out the pages of your history books to reexamine the stories you thought you knew and the ones you were never told.

Teri Finneman: I’m Teri Finneman, and I research media coverage of women in politics.

Nick Hirshon: And I’m Nick Hirshon, and I research the history of New York sports.

Ken Ward (00:33): And I’m Ken Ward, and I research the journalism history of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. And together, we’re professional media historians guiding you through our own drafts of history. Transcripts of the show are available online at journalism-history.org/podcast. This episode is sponsored by Taylor and Francis, the publisher of our academic journal, Journalism History.

(00:56):

Despite its humble beginnings in 1846, the Associated Press became an absolute force of American journalism. In the 20th century, much of that ascent to join the most prominent and powerful class of the press was due in part to the shrewd management of Kent Cooper, who joined the AP in 1910 before climbing the ranks and becoming its executive director. With me today is Gene Allen, professor emeritus at Toronto Metropolitan University and author of the book Mr. Associated Press: Kent Cooper and the 20th Century World of News.

(01:30):

Allen’s book, which covers the length of Cooper’s career, highlights what a monumental impact Cooper had not just on the Associated Press, but on the entire news industry in the first half of the 1900s.

Gene, welcome to the show. So I think people are generally aware of the Associated Press and what it does today, but some of our listeners may not know how it got going. So take us back kind of for a moment to the 19th century and help us understand how the AP got going.

Gene Allen: Sure. Well, it initially started among a group of New York newspapers in the 1840s. 1846 is generally seen as the first date, and they figured out that competing to meet the ships coming from Europe with the latest printed news by each sending out their individual boats was very wasteful, because nobody could really make much advantage over the others doing that way so they started sharing a single boat and delivering all the news from these ships to them all at the same time.

So it was that idea that a cooperative for things where there was no real advantage in putting a huge amount of money into getting a slight, you know, couple of minutes advantage. It made sense to do it that way. Then, with the telegraph, New York became the hub for the distribution of this information. And then, the information coming back into New York and being redistributed – long story about how AP developed in the 19th century, but in its modern form it really started in 1893 in Chicago as part of the Western Association of Cooperative Association News Gathering Association.

(03:03):

And the key thing about the Chicago operation was that it won dominance in the American market by making a deal with the international news cartel, which was run by Reuters of Great Britain, Havas of France, and Wolff of Germany, which had divided the world up among themselves for the distribution and sale of news just as those empires had divided up, you know, much of the world among themselves.

AP got access to all their foreign news when a competitor didn’t. This was the basis of its dominance of the US market, but the price of that was it had to limit its own news selling operation to North America. So it was in this kind of straitjacket, but it was like a golden handcuff. It worked out very well for them at a time, but this was a real problem eventually.

(03:49):

By 1910, when Kent Cooper came onto the scene in AP, it was by far the dominant American news agency although a new competitor, United Press, which had come out of the Scripps newspaper chain, was giving it a kind of a run for its money, although much less well financed, much less well established. And UP was based among newspapers, mostly afternoon papers in the Scripps chain, and then others that couldn’t get an AP membership because AP had very restricted membership rules.

So, so by 1910, AP was the dominant news agency in the US, by far an important growing competitor in United Press and this kind of straitjacket of where it could operate in the world that set the stage for Kent Cooper’s career.

Ken Ward (04:35): Well, excellent. So you mentioned Cooper. Uh, your book is firmly focused on him, right? So, tell us about Kent Cooper. Where was he from and how did he get involved in the AP?

Gene Allen: Sure. So, so Kent Cooper was a guy I had heard about. I’m interested in the history of international news agencies generally and Cooper was a guy I’d heard about, and when I found out that the AP corporate archives were open to researchers, this was around 10 years ago, and that they had a bunch of Cooper papers, I thought, “Great opportunity.”

And so, I thought it’s possible to tell the story of AP more or less from 1910 to 1950, which is when he left, through Cooper. And, and my view, of course, it’s my book (laughs) I’m gonna say this, but I thought that, you know, I thought that worked out – I thought that worked out pretty well. So he was born in Indiana. He never was able to finish university because his father died when he was in second year. His dad actually was a Democratic congressman, although Cooper was personally Republican in his sympathies, something he tried to keep out of his work at AP as much as possible.

(05:37):

We can get back to that. He was a newspaper man in Indianapolis for a few years, not long, four or five years and some people later on complained about him saying, “Well, he’d never been a rep-” Well, not somebody like Wes Gallagher, who was a successor as general manager, who had been a war correspondent, Berlin bureau chief, you know, he didn’t have that kind of on-the-ground experience, but he was great at understanding technology and that’show he came into AP.

So he started in Indiana while he was working for one of the papers, a little pony, you know, a service of very limited news distributed on a telephone party line. And this was actually cheaper than doing it by telegraph. And he eventually managed to build this out into a fairly substantial operation, was actually hired by United Press briefly to do this for them, and he went to New York in 1910 wanting to set up this system more broadly across the United States. Ended up being sent to the offices of AP and ended up being offered a job to try and build up the small paper membership of AP at the time.

Ken Ward (06:44): Okay. Well, one thing I think you do such a good job in your book focusing on those important themes from Cooper’s four decades with the AP without losing sight of the narrative. So let’s dig into some of those themes. Cooper is kind of an internationalist, you know? He wants to grow the AP’s overseas operations, but as you’ve already alluded to, to do so he had to overcome the strength of a cartel of European news agencies. So tell us about that competition.

Gene Allen: That’s right. So I mean I think a way of summarizing Cooper’s career in that respect was when he came to AP in 1910, it was the dominant news agency in the United States. By the time he left in 1951, it was well on its way to being the dominant news agency in the world. And, and one of the central themes of Cooper’s whole career was getting AP out of this straitjacket that limited its operations to North America.

So in 1918, 1919, Cooper led AP’s efforts to enter the South America news market, which was bizarrely territory of Havas, the French agency. This was actually done with very strong and direct encouragement by the US government, by the way, but, so and Cooper really chafed at these restrictions. He hated Havas. He hated Reuters, and especially he hated the Reuters general manager, a man named Roderick Jones whom he had to negotiate with, and who he, Cooper, thought never took him very seriously. As one person at Reuters said to Jones, you know, Cooper thinks you really don’t consider him a gentleman and, you know, he never gets over this, right? Uh, so that kind of British-American thing.

(08:20):

So he spent 15 years trying to get AP out of the cartel so it could sell its news around the world. It’s a long and fairly complicated, I think, kind of an interesting story. Eventually by trying to expand into Japan, he kind of forced Roderick Jones into a major strategic error, because Jones thought he would bring AP to heel by cutting off the Reuters supply of news.

By this time, however, AP had built up its own international newsgathering operation to the point that it didn’t need Reuters anymore. And Jones had to come back in a very humiliating climb down and accept whatever terms AP wanted. And AP’s terms was, “We operate wherever we want in the world, and if we kind of want to deal with you, well, that’s a little side deal and we’ll do that on our terms.”

(09:06):

So then, at the end of, or during and after the Second World War, there was a further real push for expansion. Cooper’s deputy, Lloyd Stratton, made a major tour of the world in 1943 looking at the strength, and the development of American influence, American military bases, American commercial operations everywhere around the world. And this was so that they could get into these other markets in a much more systematic and, and dominant really way than they’d been able to do before.

So by the end of his career, AP had changed into an absolutely first rank international news agency as well as the dominant US agency. So that’s probably one of the major themes of Cooper’s life and work.

Ken Ward (09:52): Sure. And at the same time all of this is playing out with the European cartel, there are competitors closer at home as well. You’ve mentioned the UP already, that agency owned by the Scripps newspaper chain that kind of grew up alongside it. So how did the UP grow even as Cooper was trying to extend the AP’s coverage and, and this control across the globe?

Gene Allen: Right. Absolutely. Well, yeah, and that’s one of the other key themes of Cooper’s career and, and indeed of everybody in AP. I mean, anybody who’s worked in journalism knows that, you know, you hate to be scooped by a competitor, right? That’s one of the worst things in the world. And AP and UP were really strongly competitive that way. UP was smaller, it was scrappier, it was cheaper, it was more sensational, it was for a long time more sort of more left to center. AP was considered conservative and kind of sort of lowercase R, republican.

Um, so that was, you know, that was a big difference between the two, but UP with its smaller budgets and, and kind of scrappier attitude played on the restrictions of AP membership. So the AP rules said that let’s say you’re a morning paper, an AP member in Pittsburgh, and somebody else wants to get an AP franchise, another morning paper in Pittsburgh. Well, you had effectively the right to veto that. Uh, this was called the right of protest, which was incredible. It meant that having an AP membership was really valuable because you could keep competitors out of the market.

(11:24):

So UP thrived among papers, a lot of them afternoon papers, a lot of them Scripps papers as I said, which could not get AP membership, and expanded. It also was not part of the international cartel. So beginning in the first decade of the 20th century, UP started operating internationally in France, in Germany, in Japan, many other countries running its own international operation. And Cooper always said, and his deputies always said, “You know, the real threat to us is that UP.” He thought that UP was doing way better job of international coverage for its American customers than AP was able to get through the cartel, because the cartel was very stodgy dealing with these national agencies that were heavily government funded.

Um, and, and they didn’t know who AP was, they didn’t respond to AP’s demands. So AP was getting killed on foreign news by UP all the time. This was one of them, Cooper’s main justifications for getting the AP board of directors to consider, you know, getting out of the cartel even though they felt it was very risky. So, yeah. Going through the AP material, I mean being beaten by UP, like they would just go nuts. They hated being beaten by, you know, they just hated it.

And there would be huge, um … there would be huge inquiries taken if AP was beaten on a big story, and especially if AP got something wrong on a big story. UP would gloat about this. It would make it public. They would use it as sales material. You know, and even though there were really only two, these two, there was also Hearst agency, relatively smaller.

(13:00):

The other complicating factor was that many papers which took United Press were also AP members at the same time, because often you would take UP as a supplementary service, you know? If there were two papers in town, both had AP, one might say, “Well, I’ll take United Press as well, because that gives me something a little extra.” So it, and, and the internal deliberations of AP therefore became very complicated, because a lot of its decisions were made on a one member/one vote basis at annual general meetings. And indeed, many members of the board of directors, most of them actually also took United Press.

So Cooper (laughs) had a very complicated situation to navigate in this. But the competition with UP was everywhere. You know, it was just a constant, which affected every aspect of AP’s operations. And Cooper was a very vigorous competitor.

Ken Ward (13:54): Well, one other thing that seems to be a constant throughout the story you tell about Cooper is that Cooper saw accuracy and neutrality not just as like journalistic ideals or something like that, but as competitive tactics. So why, like, like how did he see accuracy and neutrality? Why were they so important to him and the way he wanted to run the AP?

Gene Allen: Sure. So this case is – you’re right. It’s a very important theme for him, but this was a little different because AP already had a reputation for accuracy and neutrality when he came in. So unlike the expansion internationally and some of the technological changes he brought in, this was not an innovation on his part. It was a kind of solidification of something that was already in place and this was an absolutely unquestioned value at AP.

And in the context of competition with United Press, a lot of the AP directors and senior AP executives thought that United Press, in an effort to make its news sensational, went beyond what was factually justified. You know, they would over- they would overhype stories. They would over sensationalize. They would go out on a limb on things that later turned out not to be true or not entirely true.

(15:07):

And so people like Adolf Ochs of the New York Times, who was a major supporter of Cooper and AP director, would say, “You know, UP will do things that we will never dream of and we, as this nonprofit cooperative, we don’t have to sell news.” That was one of AP’s big stories it told about itself. It did not – it was not a profit-seeking organization, while UP was private and profit-seeking organization. Said, “We don’t have to sell news. We don’t have to hype up our product. This is our competitive advantage in that respect: that we are reliable, we are neutral, we are factual.”

Um, there’s some aspects of the story where, you know, political neutrality could be a bit difficult to maintain. So there’s part of the story where in the 1920 – was it the 1928? I guess or 1920, I can’t remember if it was 1924 offhand or 1928 presidential election. It was the campaign of Hoover versus Al Smith, and Smith was much more colorful than Hoover. Uh, Hoover was very worried about being misquoted. He wouldn’t allow himself to be misquoted, and therefore, the Democrats were getting much better publicity because they were being much more newsworthy.

(16:21):

Republican publishers – of whom there were many in AP – put a lot of pressure on Cooper to beef up their cover of the Republican campaign, mostly by devoting a reporter to Senator William Borah, who was a very fiery Republican orator, in order to make up for the dullness of Hoover. And Cooper initially said, “Well, no. He’s not the presidential candidate, and he makes the same speech every day,” and he actually tried to resist that, but eventually, the pressure was so great that he did have to give in and, and devote a full-time staffer to Borah to kind of beef up the Republican coverage.

So that was – that was unusual. You know, even though he was personally – his sympathies were politically on the Republican side, he really did try to maintain neutrality. In this case, he tried. He just couldn’t hold out long enough.

Ken Ward (17:08): And, and something related, certainly different but related to that neutrality. I found very interesting his actions around the rise of sort of totalitarian governments in Europe or places that he was active and trying to toe the line between cooperating while still maintaining some journalistic integrity. So can, can you talk about the balance he tried to find?

Gene Allen (17:29): Well, this was an incredibly complicated and, and, and I think in some ways very unsatisfactory aspect of Cooper’s career. I mean, he always painted himself as a great supporter of independent journalism and was opposed to government control of journalism, government influence. And that was one of his big criticisms of the French agency Havas and the British agency Reuters, both of which had connections to the respective governments as did many European agencies. But when it came to AP’s corporate interests, he was willing kind of to look the other way.

So in the 1930s after he had broken the shackles of the cartel, he was ready to go along with when the Nazis took over the German news agency. Turned it into Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro, run by Goebbels, you know, strictly a propaganda agency. He really resisted and would not allow criticism of the restrictions on international journalists including his own staffer, his bureau chief in Berlin, Louis Lochner, you know, he wouldn’t print any of that. And he told people in the United States, “No. No. You know, the real story about Germany is getting out and, you know, we don’t have to make a big fuss.” But that was absolutely not true.

(18:42):

I mean the, the German restrictions, the intimidation of journalists, threats of expulsion and often actual expulsion threats of, of harm to anyone, any German citizens who spoke to international journalists, you know, it definitely was limited, and that was the whole point of the German (laughs) propaganda effort, but at that point, AP needed a relation with the German agency, because it was trying to position itself internationally.

Later in a book that he published after the war, Cooper, you know, vigorously denounced the Nazi limits on press freedom, but he sure didn’t do it at the time. And that was AP also had this view always that it’s the first in/last out, you know, so Lochner’s view was, “Well, other journalists can take the risk of being kicked out of Germany because they know we’ll always be here to cover them in case they’re not, and, and we can’t take that risk. We cannot take the risk of being expelled.”

(19:36):

Similarly, Cooper went out of his way to establish AP’s relationship with the Japanese news agency, Rengo, in the 1930s when Japan was ruled by a militaristic authoritarian government. Uh, again, this was an agency that took a great deal of government money. It was involved in spreading Japanese propaganda. Um, and Cooper sort of convinced himself that this was somebody – this was an operation on the same lines as AP because it was in AP’s interest to get a foothold in Japan at the time.

So he was able to convince himself, you know, at times what was really in AP’s best interests somehow went along with his free press principles. My conclusion is that those things did not always go together very convincingly.

Ken Ward (20:27): You know, one other place Cooper really had a challenge was some new media, some new technologies that came up while he was in charge. Briefly, can you talk a bit about radio and wire photos, in particular, because those two technologies seem to pose serious challenges and opportunities?

Gene Allen: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, and Cooper came in as a technology guy, you know? I mean, he was probably – one of his greatest strengths was understanding the possibilities of new technologies for journalism. Uh, and so, radio. I mean, it’s a very long story Michael Stamm has written very well about this and others. Um, but basically, American newspapers went nuts for 20 years trying to figure out how to deal with radio, because they were worried that it would eat their lunch, that it would steal all their ad revenue and steal away their audiences, and many tried to resist it, and some of them tried to embrace it.

Generally, big city papers tried to embrace it. Small town papers tried to avoid it. It created huge problems with AP, because the fights between those who opposed and those who supported radio led to paralysis, literally for 20 years. Cooper all along thought, “Look, radio is the future. We’ve got, you know, we’ve got to adopt. We’ve got to find ways to live with it. We got to find ways to make money from it.” Which eventually they did, they made a ton of money from radio once they started supplying their news to radio stations. But radio stations were not newspapers, they were not members of the cooperative.

(21:51):

Um, so Cooper was really – he had a lot of foresight about that, but he was unable for almost 20 years to have his views prevail, because of the divisions among the membership. So that’s radio. Wire photo, this was the same day transmission of news photos just as the telegraph had allowed instantaneous transmission of textual news beginning in the 1840s. Now, photographs were still having to be transported physically from one place to another. You know, you’d have to rent charter a plane if you wanted to get a picture from Oregon, a plane crash in Oregon, to New York to disseminate or to San Francisco or something like that.

You know, the photo had to be moved physically from one place to another. Made it very slow, and it made it very difficult to have a regular diet of news photos as part of the news menu that each newspaper had to offer to its readers. So, Cooper managed, again, also very good sort of organizational structure guy, managed to set up a deal for a full-time live network of connection that would allow photos to be transmitted virtually instantaneously within a few minutes to this network all around the country.

(23:10):

It was very expensive, mostly supported by big papers, opposed virulently by United Press and by Hearst International News system, because they knew that if AP did it, they’d have to do the same and they didn’t want to spend all that money. And, and, and many of them were AP members, remember. (laughs) So that, you know, those papers were AP members. Roy Howard, Cooper’s great nemesis at UP, you know, wouldn’t speak at AP annual meetings because – he had a right to speak there, but he really put them into a corner, and wire photo was a great success and it really changed the texture and nature of daily journalism so that pictures became a steady part, you know, a steady part of the news diet instead of being something you would get occasionally and mostly for a feature story rather than for breaking news. So, he is really strong on those things.

Ken Ward (23:59): And, and there are so many things about Cooper that you touch on in the book that are interesting and important that I wish we had more time to talk about, but in light of the things we have discussed so far, how should we look at Cooper in the end? Like, was he primarily a modernizer or an expansionist? And was the AP stronger as a consequence of his leadership?

Gene Allen: Uh, yes. Absolutely. He was a great organization man. He was absolutely a modernizer. We haven’t talked about it, but he really changed the kinds of stories that AP did to compete with United Press. So, covered more sports, covered more entertainment, tried to go for a livelier writing style, all those things, which was very important competitively. He absolutely led this international expansion of AP. So that, that was crucial.

And he cemented, I think, its position as the dominant US agency both through changes in the news diet, changes in the international operation, the new technologies that he introduced. So, he was really successful at that. He made himself what he called a crusade for press freedom, which he became quite a strong public figure in advocating that.

(25:13):

And I think it was important that he did that, and I think those values are important. You know, as I’ve said, I think his actions were not always 100% consistent with the principles that he enunciated, especially when AP’s corporate interests were involved, because fundamentally when it came down to it, AP’s interests were Cooper’s interests. And he was very adept at advancing AP’s interests.

Ken Ward (25:38): Well, I wish we had more time to get into some of those other stories about Cooper, but we’re short on time. So I just wanna ask one last question, and it’s one that we ask all our guests and that is, why does journalism history matter?

Gene Allen (25:52): Yeah, you mentioned that to me, Ken, and I think it’s a great question. Um, to me, of course, this is what I’ve been doing (laughs) for the last 20 years. It’s obvious, you know, I mean, there’s an Australian scholar, John Hartley, who says, “Journalism is the sense-making practice of modernity.” Right? For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, journalism is the way by which people have figured out where they fit in the world, you know? When we hear about the war in Ukraine or what the Taliban is doing in Afghanistan now or the Spanish Civil War in the ’30s.

(26:25):

Uh, we only know about those things through journalism, you know, mostly what’s going on in Washington for American readers or in Ottawa for Canadian readers. You know about that through journalism. So if you see journalism as one of the central elements of the modern world, of how people live in the modern world, make sense of the modern world, act in the modern world, it seems to me the history of this institution and, and these practices is, you know, what could be more important, understanding how it got to be the way it was? Or it, or in my case, sometimes seeing its limitations, you know, in the choices that were made. So, so that’s one aspect of my answer.

(27:08):

My other aspect, which may not be true for everyone, you know, but I think for journalism scholars in journalism schools, sometimes we have a little difficulty convincing our colleagues and our students that journalism history deserves a place in the curriculum. I think it absolutely does.

I think, for example, the absolutely time-wasting stupid opposition to radio in the 1920s and ’30s has very direct relevance to the failure of newspapers generally to respond adequately to the internet beginning of the 1990s, you know? They thought, “Well, we can just – we can co-op this or we can just change our, you know, tweak our business model around the edges.” And they were very slow, very slow to see the existential nature and didn’t really embrace it as a thing in itself.

(27:54):

They thought, “Well, we’ll just try and blunt its appeal.” Which I think the history of new technology and journalism tells you, it does not, does not work. So, I think that’s a practical example of what we can learn from it. But I also think, I mean, people like Barbie Zelizer have said, you know, that journalism studies generally suffers from a lack of historical perspective. And that’s sure something I agree with. I wasn’t always able to convince all my colleagues that was so, but, but boy, I was in there pitching, you know?

Ken Ward (28:23): Absolutely. Well, well, Gene, I’ve really enjoyed our conversation. This was great. I love learning more about Kent Cooper and the Associated Press. Such an interesting time. So thanks again for being on the show.

Gene Allen: Well, thank you so much, Ken. I really appreciate the opportunity and, and your interest. It’s really – really enjoyed it.

Ken Ward (28:40): Well, that’s it for this episode. Again, the book is Mr. Associated Press, Kent Cooper and the 20th Century World of News. Thanks for tuning in and be sure to subscribe to our podcast. You can also follow us on Twitter @jhistoryjournal. That’s all one word. Until next time, I’m your host, Ken Ward, signing off with the words of Edward R. Murrow: “Good night and good luck.”