100 for the A. P.

Six New York newspapers, tired of cutting each other's throats to get the news from outside the city, called a truce. Around a table at the New York Sun, they agreed to pool their stories. In a one-room walkup at Broadway and Liberty Street, they set up a one-man staff (named Jones) to run things. The name on the door: Associated Press.

This week, 100 years later, the A.P. passed its centenary* without so much as a pause of its clacking teletypes. In that time, it has become the world's biggest, most efficient and most impersonal news service, pumping a million words a day between 55 countries, by radio and a 300,000-mile network of wire.

Court Circular. Last week, over the "A" wire from New York, went a curt special message: "Alan J. Gould is appointed executive editor of the Associated Press . . ." It was signed K.C., which (as every staffer and member knows) are the initials of 68-year-old Kent Cooper, A.P.'s general manager and executive director. K.C. was bestowing a title that had been vacant since Byron Price left in 1941 to become wartime Director of Censorship. The circuits buzzed with talk that Gould, who had been one of the six assistant general managers, was now the heir apparent to K.C.--an impatient, demanding boss who has shown no signs of retiring.

At 50, greying Alan Gould is a slight, bow-tied, cigar-chomping newsman with 26 years of A.P. routine under his belt. He took a year to jump from sports editor of the Elmira (N.Y.) Star-Gazette, a job his son now holds, to sports editor of A.P. Gould systematized A.P. sports coverage, built the staff from half a dozen men to 30, soaked up enough all-around news training to be picked by Cooper to deploy the A.P.'s forces when war came.

Unlike Cooper, whose deskless office at 50 Rockefeller Plaza is a throne room where few staffers ever set foot, Alan Gould is one of the boys. He drinks with them (rum) and bowls with them on an office team (his average: 170). His weekly "A.P. Log," a pep talk to keep the bureaus and the staff of 1,500 on their toes, 'is right out of the locker room. (Sample: "The Washington bureau pitched a spectacular shutout [against the U.P.] on a Supreme Court story . . .") Gould's own writing ability was summed up by one bureau man: "Our most notoriously long-winded writer. No paragraph will cut--you have to rewrite the whole piece."

Faster & Farther. How well does the A.P. do its job? Thanks to Kent Cooper, the words and pictures that Gould supervises flow faster and farther than news ever moved before. Over the grumblings of A.P.'s stick-in-the-mud elder statesmen, Traffic Expert Cooper bought teletypes (1915) and Wirephoto (1935). He inaugurated bylines for staffers (1925), added comics, columns and bedtime stories. His biggest crusade--against world censorship and propaganda barriers --failed. But A.P.'s growth under Cooper toppled the Reuter-dominated global news cartel. "The isolationism of A.P. when I came in," says Cooper, "was criminal. We simply didn't tell the story of America."

Now A.P. does tell the story, in its somewhat lumbering fashion, to any country that will buy or barter its news. It has 125 U.S.-trained men abroad (90 prewar). But the A.P. has refused to let the State Department use its file for the "Voice of America," lest foreigners suspect its "impartiality."

To help unlard the A.P.'s avoirduprose, Gould hired Readability Expert Dr. Rudolf Flesch (TIME, Feb. 16). There are signs also that the A.P. is getting over the timidity that makes it (for fear of offending one of its 3,900 members) almost objectionably objective. "We have a duty," said Gould's log, "to give the reader some idea of how near the truth a broadcast or communique may be . . ." And the A.P. is encouraging its own Managing Editors Association to find fault. Many an M.E. thinks the world's best news service could still be considerably improved.

*A.P. was not organized in its present pattern --a nonprofit cooperative--until 1892. The organizers were members of the "Western A.P.," a rebel group that had broken away from the monopolistic New York A.P. in 1864.

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