The Wrangell sentinel., 1940-11-15
AP Feature Service

Grambling into a 5o6-page book called "AP-The story of News.
 Published Cby Farrar and Rine- hart), it adds brand new chapters 10 the history of the worlds largest cooperative news gathering asso- citation and to the history of all newsdom.
 IL is laced with the exploits of AP men-sueh as Kiriloff who strapped himself to a horse and rode i've hours with 8 bullet in his right lung to get out the story of Liaoyung in the Russo-Japanese. war. And of the San Francisco staff who dispatched exclusive news of lhe great earthquake while build ings tumbled about their ears.
 But some Of it's chief interest lies in accounts Of the forgotten years between lS4S, when The Associated Press name first appeared. and 1895. when the modern cooperative emer- ged.
 Through 1t all the news itself has been the important thing. Gramling's stories Of the news and the men who gathered 1t are the kind that newspapermen wall al- ways lind expressing. such as
 How an early agent used to file, the Bible to hold the Halifax wire against all corners for important ship news.
 How string correspondent Mark Kellogg wrote T go with Custer and will be at the deatha- and was.
 How the AP spent $25,000 char tering a yacht and hiring Marconi 10 help report a yacht race by wire less, even before the navy had ra- dio.
 How Cortesi cabled number mis- sing bond 404' to get past the cen sors the fact that Pope Leo XIII died at 4:04 p. n. one fine day in 1902.
 How the new AP system of re- porting elections was justified bril- HantIy in 1916 by naming Wilson president after friends had coneed- ed to Hughes.
 How Fancho Villa held off re- YolutiOnary attack until after the World Series, on the advice of an AP man, so he might get break in L. 5. papers.
 How Paul CoYles cabled draw ing $60,00O," and did so, to buy a yacht for Russo-Japanese war coYerage.
 How AP stood pat for hours in face of the "armistice" reports that later proved false.
 How AP scored brilliantly on the Lindbergh Kidnapping and tripped up on the conviction Of Hauptmann. C'The AP had made a mistake and that was news.")
 How Eddie Neil died war cor respondents death in Spain.
 Organized news gathering was begun in 1811, Granting rscounts, by Samuel Topliff, Jr., who kept the news book" at a Boston coffee house. Later, newspapers in thriv- ing New York sent rowboats to hail incoming ships for news.
 Young David Hale of the Journal of Commerce, bucking an old guard of established papers, stepped up competition by using a saiIboat From there the way led to bigger boats, to carrier pigeon relays and to pony expresses. By Mexican war times the burden was so heavy that Hale proposed pooling resources to stop the ruinous costs.
 So New York's big six papers formed a cooperative called The As sociated Press. The SIX arranged to get news from boats at Halifax, rush it on the new-fangled tele- graph wires to New York. They hired Dr. Alexander Jones as first general agent at $20 a week and gave him an assistant
 (The modern AP has 1,400 mem- bers newspapers and spends S11,- 000,000 a year on news and news pictures.)
 The association sold news to out side newspapers but it had no in- tention of letting them in on the good thing of actual membership.
 This original organization carried on through the Civil war with ex. banding facilities, doing accurate and objective reporting in a day of flowery newspaper language and uncertain facts.
 But in the growing cities of the west, newspaper subscribers to AZ news wanted to have something tc say about the organization. After a flare-up in 1866, the old AP kept the westerners in line by sending Alexander Wilson to London as tht first American correspondent abroad and so improving it's news report that the dissideRts came back into the fold.
 But in 1889 the westerners smel led corruption and, led by Victor Lawson, father of the modern AP disclosed that as a result of a con spiracy AP news was being filchet systematically by the United Pres,