Kent Cooper and the Associated Press: An Autobiography
(First edition. The Chief executive of the Associated Pres...)
First edition. The Chief executive of the Associated Press tells the history of the greatest news agency and also of his life. x , 334 pages. dust jacket.. 8vo..
Kent Cooper was an American journalist who served with the Associated Press for more than 50 years.
Background
Kent Cooper was born on March 22, 1880 in Columbus, Indiana, United States. He was the son of George William Cooper, a lawyer, and Sina Green. He spent occasional winters in Washington, D. C. , where his father served in the United States House of Representatives from 1889 to 1895.
Education
Upon his father's death in 1899, Cooper had to leave Indiana University in his sophomore year. In 1941, Cooper received an honorary degree from Indiana University.
Career
He took a job as a reporter on the Indianapolis Press, and when the Press ceased publication eighteen months later, he was hired by the Indianapolis Sun. In 1903 he became an Indianapolis correspondent for the Scripps-McRae Press Association (SMPA). In this post he developed a network of small newspapers as clients for a SMPA "pony" (abbreviated) news service.
When SMPA refused to give him a raise, he resigned and formed his own agency in 1905.
SMPA bought out Cooper in 1906, and he again worked as their Indianapolis bureau chief. In 1907 SMPA was absorbed by the United Press (UP). Cooper became a traveling agent for UP, using the advantages of the telephone circuit to lure small papers away from the older and more powerful Associated Press (AP).
Cooper went to New York in 1910 to discuss with the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT & T) his ideas for forming his own news transmission company. AT& T officials were not interested but encouraged Cooper to see Melville E. Stone, general manager of AP. Stone promptly offered him a job as traveling inspector at $65 a week. Cooper hesitated, then accepted because "I thought I might go further than I could at UP where there were several competent young men with high ambitions . AP's men were elderly. "
In the next two years Cooper traveled to every AP bureau and member office collecting information and making contacts. He developed plans to restructure AP and renegotiate wire leasing agreements. When Stone failed to act on his recommendations, Cooper went directly to board members Adolph S. Ochs and Valentine S. McClatchy. With their backing, he put his plans into effect, saving AP $100, 000 in one year.
At the age of thirty-two Cooper was made chief of AP's newly created Traffic Department.
Cooper also began to articulate his central vision: the creation of a worldwide AP. AP's role in the world was circumscribed by a set of exclusive contracts with the big three European news agencies--Reuter's of Great Britain, Havas of France, and Wolff of Germany (Reuter's being the most dominant)--who virtually controlled news dissemination throughout the world. These contracts gave AP the exclusive right to "exploit" North America but prevented it from operating independently anywhere else. AP had a decided advantage because its competitors, UP and Hearst's International News Service (INS), were denied access to Reuter's dispatches. But the agreement left AP dependent upon these European dispatches (which Cooper regarded as unreliable and propagandistic) and prevented AP's expansion. Although Stone resolutely backed the AP-Reuter's pact, Cooper, for idealistic and pragmatic reasons, worked steadfastly throughout his career so that AP could compete internationally. He began in 1918 by negotiating with Havas a "free hand" for AP in South America. In 1920, shortly after the death of his wife, Cooper was named assistant general manager.
In April 1925 he was elected general manager and immediately began to make sweeping changes in AP's rather staid image.
Accordingly, he inaugurated an AP feature service, expanded over the years to include Hollywood gossip and cartoons. He lifted a ban on the use of slang, ran interviews, awarded by-lines, and hired special writers to cover science and medicine.
In 1927 he established an AP mail photo service and developed the idea of sending pictures directly over the wires. (The AP Wirephoto was first used in 1935. ) Cooper was also laying the groundwork for AP's eventual break with Reuter's and the Europen cartel. As he explained in his Barriers Down (1942), the chance came in 1933 when he negotiated a nonexclusive contract with Rengo News Association of Japan, formerly allied with Reuter's. When Reuter's chief, Sir Roderick Jones, heard of the AP-Rengo agreement, he was incensed and terminated the AP-Reuter's contract. Cooper consolidated his position by making a five-year pact with UP in which they agreed not to negotiate exclusive contracts with any European agency. The new AP-Reuter's agreement signed in February 1934 gave AP freedom to expand throughout the world--which it did rapidly under Cooper's aggressive leadership. In 1943, he became AP's executive director. He retired as general manager in 1948 but remained executive director until 1951.
He wrote The Right to Know (1956), an informal history of press censorship, and his autobiography, Kent Cooper and the Associated Press (1959).
In estimating his own achievements, Cooper was proudest of his crusade against cartel control of international news. Most of his contemporaries agreed with him, although some argued that this and other of Cooper's innovations resulted less from his personal foresight than from competitive pressures on AP from rival press associations.
Whatever his motivations, Cooper's energetic and single-minded devotion to AP transformed it in forty-one years from the most parochial of American news agencies into a dominant international force.
(First edition. The Chief executive of the Associated Pres...)
Views
Cooper believed that "there is nothing so important as the true day-by-day story of humanity. "
Personality
He was ambitious and restless.
Quotes from others about the person
"He was a tradition-smasher and an applecartupsetter. He swept through the stodgy newspaper atmosphere of his day like a polar wind. " (Hal Boyle)
Connections
On May 29, 1905, Cooper married Daisy McBride; they had one daughter. He married Marian Rothwell on September 27, 1920. Divorced in 1940, Cooper was married on February 28, 1942, to Sarah A. Gibbs, his executive secretary for many years.