United Press International

News room of United Press in New York, 1933

Formally named United Press Associations for incorporation and legal purposes, but publicly known and identified as United Press or UP, the news agency was created by the 1907 uniting of three smaller news syndicates by the Midwest newspaper publisher E. W. Scripps.^[2][3][4] It was headed by Hugh Baillie (1890–1966) from 1935 to 1955. At the time of his retirement, UP had 2,900 clients in the United States, and 1,500 abroad.^[5]

In 1958, it became United Press International after absorbing the International News Service (INS) in May.^[6][7] As either UP or UPI, the agency was among the largest newswire services in the world, competing domestically for about 90 years with the Associated Press (AP) and internationally with AP, Reuters and Agence France-Presse (AFP).

At its peak, UPI had more than 2,000 full-time employees; and 200 news bureaus in 92 countries; it had more than 6,000 media subscribers. With the rising popularity of television news, the business of UPI began to decline as the circulation of afternoon newspapers, its chief client category, began to fall. Its decline accelerated after the 1982 sale of UPI by the Scripps company.^[8]

The E.W. Scripps Company controlled United Press until its absorption of William Randolph Hearst's smaller competing agency, INS, in 1958 to form UPI. With the Hearst Corporation as a minority partner, UPI continued under Scripps management until 1982.^[2][3][4]

Since its sale in 1982, UPI has changed ownership several times and was twice in Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization.^[9] With each change in ownership came deeper service and staff cutbacks and changes of focus and a corresponding shrinkage of its traditional media customer base. Since the 1999 sale of its broadcast client list to its one-time major rival, the AP, UPI has concentrated on smaller information market niches. It no longer services media organizations in a major way.^[10]

In 2000, UPI was purchased by News World Communications, an international news media company founded in 1976 by Unification Church leader Sun Myung Moon.^[11][12]

It now maintains a news website and photo service and electronically publishes several information product packages. Based mostly on aggregation from other sources on the Web and gathered by a small editorial staff and stringers, UPI's daily content consists of a newsbrief summary service called "NewsTrack," which includes general, business, sports, science, health and entertainment reports, and "Quirks in the News." It also sells a premium service, which has deeper coverage and analysis of emerging threats, the security industry, and energy resources. UPI's content is presented in text, video and photo formats, in English, Spanish, and Arabic.^[13]

UPI's main office is in the Miami metropolitan area and it maintains office locations in five other countries and uses freelance journalists in other major cities.

United Press Associations

Portrait photograph of E. W. Scripps, c. 1912

Beginning with the Cleveland Press, publisher E. W. Scripps (1854–1926) created the first chain of newspapers in the United States. Because the then recently reorganized Associated Press refused to sell its services to several of his papers, most of them evening dailies in competition with existing AP franchise holders, in 1907 Scripps merged three smaller syndicates under his ownership or control, the Publishers Press Association, the Scripps-McRae Press Association, and the Scripps News Association, to form United Press Associations, with headquarters in New York City.^[2][3][4]

Scripps had been a subscriber to an earlier news agency, also named United Press, that existed in the late 1800s, partly in cooperation with management of the original New York-based AP and partly in existential competition with two Chicago-based organizations also using the AP name (as detailed at Associated Press and in AP's 2007 history, Breaking News: How the Associated Press Has Covered War, Peace, and Everything Else, cited in Notes).^[2][3]

Drawing lessons from the battles between the earlier United Press and the various AP's, Scripps required that there be no restrictions on who could buy news from his news service, and he made the new UP service available to anyone, including his competitors. Scripps also hoped to make a profit from selling that news to papers owned by others. At that time and until World War II, most newspapers relied on news agencies for stories outside their immediate geographic areas.^[2][14]

Despite strong newspaper industry opposition, UP started to sell news to the new and competitive radio medium in 1935, years before competitor AP, controlled by the newspaper industry, did likewise.

Scripps' United Press was considered "a scrappy alternative" news source to the AP. UP reporters were called "Unipressers" and were noted for their fiercely aggressive and competitive streak.^[14] Another hallmark of the company's culture was little formal training of reporters; new hires were often thrust into a "sink-or-swim" situation of reporting on an unfamiliar subject. They were weaned on UP's famous and well-documented (though frequently misappropriated and misquoted) slogan of "Get it first, but FIRST, get it RIGHT."^[2] Despite controversy, UP (and later UPI) became a common training ground for generations of journalists.^[14]

Walter Cronkite, who started with United Press in Kansas City, gained fame for his coverage of World War II in Europe and turned down Edward R. Murrow's first offer of a CBS job to stay with UP, but who later went on to anchor the CBS Evening News, once said, "I felt every Unipresser got up in the morning saying, 'This is the day I'm going to beat the hell out of AP.' That was part of the spirit. We knew we were undermanned. But we knew we could do a darn good job despite that, and so many times, we did."^[14]

Despite that, like all agencies that deal with huge volumes of timely information, UP and later UPI had its share of remembered mistakes. As recounted in the various printed histories of UPI cited in Notes, the most famous one came early in its history. UP's president, Roy W. Howard, then traveling in France, telegraphed that the 1918 armistice ending World War I had been declared four days before it happened. Howard's reputation survived and he later became a Scripps partner, whose name appeared in one of the Scripps subsidiary companies, Scripps-Howard. But the mistake dogged UP/UPI for generations. Still, the agency's reporters were often able to tell stories more quickly and accurately although they were usually outnumbered by the competition. In 1950, for example, UP reported the invasion of South Korea by North Korea two hours and forty minutes before its archrival, the AP. The New York Times later apologized to UP for refusing to print information on the invasion until the AP had confirmed it.^[2]

United Press International

Frank Bartholomew, the last UP president to ascend to the agency's top job directly from its news, rather than sales ranks, took over in 1955, and according to his memoirs cited in Notes, was obsessed with merging UP with the International News Service, a news agency that had been founded by William Randolph Hearst in 1909 following Scripps' lead.

Bartholomew succeeded in putting the "I" in UPI in 1958 when UP and INS merged to become United Press International on May 24.^[6][7] The new UPI now had 6,000 employees and 5,000 subscribers, about a thousand of them newspapers.^[14][15]

The merger was aimed at creating a stronger competitor for the Associated Press and a stronger economic entity than either UP or INS. The newly formed United Press International (UPI) had 950 client newspapers.^[15] Fearing possible antitrust issues with the Eisenhower Administration Justice Department, Scripps and Hearst rushed the merger through with unusual speed and secrecy.

Although all UP employees were retained, most INS employees lost their jobs with practically no warning. A relative few did join the new UPI and the columns of popular INS writers, such as Bob Considine, Louella Parsons and Ruth Montgomery, were carried by UPI.^[15]

Rival AP was a publishers' cooperative and could assess its members to help pay the extraordinary costs of covering major news—wars, the Olympic Games, national political conventions. UPI clients, in contrast, paid a fixed annual rate; depending on individual contracts, UPI could not always ask them to help shoulder the extraordinary coverage costs. In its heyday, newspapers typically paid UPI about half what they paid AP in the same cities for the same services: At one point, for example, the Chicago Sun-Times paid AP $12,500 a week, but UPI only $5,000; the Wall Street Journal paid AP $36,000 a week, but UPI only $19,300. The AP, which serviced 1,243 newspapers at the time, remained UPI's main competitor.^[14][15] In 1959, UPI had 6,208 clients in 92 countries and territories, 234 news and picture bureaus, and an annual payroll of $34,000,000, ($316,052,511 in today's dollars).^[14][16]

But the UP-INS merger involved another business component that was to hurt the new UPI company badly in later years. Because INS had been a subsidiary of Hearst's King Features Syndicate and Scripps controlled several other newspaper syndicates, both companies feared possible antitrust issues. So they deliberately kept their respective syndicates out of the combined UPI company. That move cost UPI the revenues of its previous United Feature Syndicate subsidiary, which in later years made large profits on the syndication of Peanuts and other popular comic strips and columns.

UPI had an advantage of independence over the AP in reporting on the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Because the AP was a cooperative essentially owned by the newspapers, those in the South influenced its coverage of the racial unrest and protests, often ignoring, minimizing, or slanting the reporting.^[14] UPI did not have that sort of pressure, and management, according to UPI reporters and photographers of the day, allowed them much freedom in chronicling the events of the civil rights struggle.^[14]

White House reporter Helen Thomas became the public face of UPI, as she was seen at televised press conferences beginning in the early 1960s.^[14] UPI famously scooped the AP in reporting the assassination of US President John Kennedy on Friday, November 22, 1963.^[14] UPI White House reporter Merriman Smith was an eyewitness, and he commandeered the press car's only phone to dictate the story to UPI as AP reporter Jack Bell tried—without success—to wrest the phone away so he could call his office.^[8] Smith and UPI won a Pulitzer Prize for this reporting.^[14]

UP/UPI Newspictures, Newsfilm and Audio/Radio Network

United Press had no direct wirephoto service until 1952, when it absorbed co-owned ACME Newspictures, under pressure from parent company Scripps to better compete with AP's news and photo services.^[17]

By that time, UP was also deeply involved with the newer visual medium of television. In 1948, it entered into a partnership with 20th Century Fox subsidiary Fox Movietone News to shoot newsfilm for television stations. That service, United Press Movietone, or UPMT, was a pioneer in newsfilm syndication and numbered among its clients major US and foreign networks and local stations, including for many years the early TV operation of ABC News. In subsequent decades, it underwent several changes in partnerships and names, becoming best known as United Press International Television News (UPITN). Senior UPITN executives later helped Ted Turner create CNN, with its first two presidents, Reese Schonfeld and Burt Reinhardt, coming from UPITN ranks.

The UPI Audio actuality service for radio stations, created in 1958 and later renamed the United Press International Radio Network, was a spinoff from the newsfilm service and eventually provided news material to more than a thousand radio stations and US and foreign networks, including NPR.^[18]

Decline

UPI came close to the size of the AP in the early 1960s, but as publishing companies began to pare their evening newspapers, it was dropped by papers that could no longer afford to subscribe to both UPI and the AP.^[14] UPI's failure to develop a television presence or subsidiary television news service has also been cited as one of the causes of its decline.^[14] By the early 1980s, the number of staffers was down to 1,800 and there were just 100 news bureaus.^[19]

Under pressure from some of E. W. Scripps' heirs, the Scripps company, which had been underwriting UPI's expenses at a loss for at least two decades, began trying to transfer control of UPI in the early 1980s. It tried to bring in additional newspaper industry partners and when that failed, engaged in serious negotiations with British competitor Reuters, which wanted to increase its US presence. As detailed in "Down to the Wire", by Gordon and Cohen, cited in Notes, Reuters did extensive due diligence and expressed an interest in parts of the UPI service, but did not wish to maintain it in full.

Scripps wound up giving the agency away to two inexperienced businessmen, Douglas Ruhe (son of David Ruhe, a member of the Universal House of Justice, the supreme governing body of the Baháʼí Faith) and William Geissler, originally associated with two better-known partners, who soon departed. Ruhe and Geissler obtained UPI for $1. Under the terms of the purchase agreement, Scripps first injected UPI with a $5 million cash balance, in acknowledgement of the $1.0 – $1.5 million per month that UPI was already losing. Facing news industry skepticism about their background and qualifications to run an international news agency, Ruhe and Geissler watched an increase in contract cancellations. Despite serious cash flow problems, they moved UPI's headquarters from New York City to Washington, DC, incurring significant additional costs due to construction cost overruns.

During this period, UPI's 25-year-old audio news actuality service for radio stations was renamed the United Press International Radio Network. But faced with recurring cash shortages and difficulty meeting payroll, the Ruhe-Geissler management sold UPI's foreign photo service and some rights to its US and foreign photos to the Reuters news agency.^[20] It also sold UPI's U.S. photo library, which included the archives of predecessor Scripps photo agency Acme and the pictures and negatives of International News Photos, the picture component of Hearst's INS to the Bettman Archive. Bettman was later sold to Microsoft founder Bill Gates's separate Corbis Corporation, storing them underground in Pennsylvania and digitizing them for licensing, frequently without any notation of their UPI origins. In August 2011 Corbis announced a deal with AP to distribute each other's photos to their clients, effectively combining the pre-1983 UPI library with that of its former main rival for some marketing purposes.^[21] In 2016 Corbis sold to the Visual China Group.^[22]

UPI's remaining minority stake in UPITN was also sold and the agency was renamed Worldwide Television News (WTN). As with its photographs, UPI thereby lost all control of its newsfilm and video library, which is now held by WTN-successor Associated Press Television News, which entered the video news field long after UPI left it.

Years of mismanagement, missed opportunities and continual wage and staff cuts followed.^[8] By 1984, UPI had descended into the first of two Chapter 11 bankruptcies.^[8][9] Mario Vázquez Raña, a Mexican media magnate, with a nominal American minority partner, Houston real estate developer Joseph Russo, purchased UPI out of bankruptcy for $40 million, losing millions during his short tenure, and firing numerous high-level staff.^[8]

In 1988, Vázquez Raña sold UPI to Infotechnology, Inc., an information technology and venture capital company and parent company of cable TV's Financial News Network, both headed by Earl Brian, who also became UPI chairman.^[8] In early 1991, Infotechnology itself filed for bankruptcy, announced layoffs at UPI and sought to terminate certain employee benefits in an attempt to keep UPI afloat. At that point, UPI was down to 585 employees.^[10][23] Later that year, UPI filed for bankruptcy for the second time, asking for relief from $50 million in debt so that it could be sale-able.^[23] In 1992, a group of Saudi investors, ARA Group International (AGI), bought the bankrupt UPI for $4 million.^[19]

By 1998, UPI had fewer than 250 employees and 12 offices.^[19] Although the Saudi-based investors claimed to have poured more than $120 million into UPI, it had failed to turn a profit.^[19] The company had begun to sell Internet-adapted products to such websites as Excite and Yahoo.^[19] At that point, UPI CEO Arnaud de Borchgrave orchestrated UPI's exit from its last major media niche, the broadcast news business that United Press had initiated in the 1930s. De Borchgrave maintained that "what was brilliant pioneering work on the part of UPI prior to World War II, with radio news, is now a static quantity and so far as I'm concerned, certainly doesn't fit into my plans for the future". He sought to shift UPI's dwindling resources into Internet-based delivery of newsletter services, focusing more on technical and diplomatic specialties than on general news. The rump UPI thus sold the client list of its still-significant radio network and broadcast wire to its former rival, the AP.^[14][18]

Current ownership

United Press International office in Washington D.C., circa 2005

UPI was purchased in May 2000 by News World Communications, a media conglomerate founded by Unification movement founder Sun Myung Moon, which also owned The Washington Times and newspapers in South Korea, Japan, and South America.^[11] The next day, UPI's White House correspondent, Helen Thomas, resigned her position, after working for UPI for 57 years.^[24]

In 2007, as part of a restructuring to keep UPI in business and profitable, management cut 11 staff from its Washington, D.C. office and no longer had a reporter in the White House press corps or a bureau covering the United Nations.^[11][25] UPI spokespersons and press releases said the company would be focusing instead on expanding operations in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa, and reporting on security threats, intelligence and energy issues.^[11][25] In 2008, UPI began UPIU, a journalism mentoring platform for students and journalism schools, that allowed recent college graduates to post their work on the site but did not pay for stories.^[26]

Discover more about History related topics

E. W. Scripps

E. W. Scripps

Edward Willis Scripps, was an American newspaper publisher and, together with his sister Ellen Browning Scripps, founder of The E. W. Scripps Company, a diversified media conglomerate, and United Press news service. It became United Press International (UPI) when International News Service (INS) merged with United Press in 1958. The E. W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University is named for him.

Hugh Baillie

Hugh Baillie

Hugh Baillie was an American journalist best known as the head of UP, the leading rival to the Associated Press. As president 1935-1955, he was an overall charge of business operations, and dealings with his correspondents and subscribing newspapers. Baillie was the son of a prominent journalist in New York, and joined UP in 1915 after attending the University of Southern California. He personally interviewed top European leaders in the coming of World War II, including Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Neville Chamberlain. He covered the American invasion of Sicily in 1943, and the Belgian campaign in 1944, in which he was wounded.

International News Service

International News Service

The International News Service (INS) was a U.S.-based news agency (newswire) founded by newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst in 1909. In May 1958 it merged with rival United Press to become United Press International.

Associated Press

Associated Press

The Associated Press (AP) is an American not-for-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association, and produces news reports that are distributed to its members, U.S. newspapers and broadcasters. Since the award was established in 1917, the AP has earned 56 Pulitzer Prizes, including 34 for photography. It is also known for publishing the widely used AP Stylebook.

Reuters

Reuters

Reuters is a news agency owned by Thomson Reuters Corporation. It employs around 2,500 journalists and 600 photojournalists in about 200 locations worldwide. Reuters is one of the largest news agencies in the world.

Agence France-Presse

Agence France-Presse

Agence France-Presse (AFP) is a French international news agency headquartered in Paris, France. Founded in 1835 as Havas, it is the world's oldest news agency.

William Randolph Hearst

William Randolph Hearst

William Randolph Hearst Sr. was an American businessman, newspaper publisher, and politician known for developing the nation's largest newspaper chain and media company, Hearst Communications. His flamboyant methods of yellow journalism influenced the nation's popular media by emphasizing sensationalism and human interest stories. Hearst entered the publishing business in 1887 with Mitchell Trubitt after being given control of The San Francisco Examiner by his wealthy father, Senator George Hearst.

News World Communications

News World Communications

News World Communications Inc. is an American international news media corporation.

Unification Church

Unification Church

The Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, widely known as the Unification Church, is a new religious movement, derived from Christianity, whose members are called Unificationists or "Moonies". It was officially founded on 1 May 1954 under the name Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity (HSA-UWC) in Seoul, South Korea, by Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012). Moon and his wife Hak Ja Han are its the leaders, and are honored by its members as their "True Parents".

Sun Myung Moon

Sun Myung Moon

Sun Myung Moon was a Korean religious leader, also known for his business ventures and support for conservative political causes. A messiah claimant, he was the founder of the Unification movement, and of its widely noted "Blessing" or mass wedding ceremonies, and the author of its unique theology the Divine Principle. He was an anti-communist and an advocate for Korean reunification, for which he was recognized by the governments of both North and South Korea. Businesses he promoted included News World Communications, an international news media corporation known for its American subsidiary The Washington Times, and Tongil Group, a South Korean business group (chaebol), as well as other related organizations.

Stringer (journalism)

Stringer (journalism)

In journalism, a stringer is a freelance journalist, photographer, or videographer who contributes reports, photos, or videos to a news organization on an ongoing basis but is paid individually for each piece of published or broadcast work.

Cleveland Press

Cleveland Press

The Cleveland Press was a daily American newspaper published in Cleveland, Ohio from November 2, 1878, through June 17, 1982. From 1928 to 1966, the paper's editor was Louis B. Seltzer.

United Press International conferred sports awards annually until 1996. The awards were given to basketball players, basketball coaches, football players and athletes in general. The different awards were:

• UPI Athlete of the Year

Basketball

• UPI College Basketball Coach of the Year
• UPI College Basketball Player of the Year

Football

• UPI College Football Player of the Year
• UPI College Lineman of the Year
• UPI NFC Player of the Year
• UPI AFL-AFC Player of the Year
• UPI NFL Rookie of the Year
• UPI NFL Player of the Year

Discover more about UPI sports awards related topics

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While much of normal news agency work is little publicized, many UP/UPI news staffers have gained fame, either while with the agency or in later careers. They include journalists, news executives, novelists and high government officials.

Among them:

• James Atherton, veteran news photographer who caught iconic moments through a lens in Washington D.C. for over forty years
• Rod Beaton, president and chief executive officer of United Press International from 1972 to 1982^[27][28]
• David Belnap, UPI Latin American Bureau Chief and later Foreign Desk Editor for the Los Angeles Times
• Jack Berry, UPI correspondent in Lansing, Michigan from 1956 to 1959^[29]
• Arnaud de Borchgrave, veteran foreign correspondent and UPI executive
• Myram Borders, longtime Las Vegas bureau manager who broke the story of Elvis Presley's marriage
• David Brinkley, co-anchor of NBC's Huntley-Brinkley Report and anchor of ABC's This Week
• Lucien Carr, contemporary of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in the Beat Generation movement
• Marquis Childs (1903-1990), later "Washington Calling" columnist
• Raymond Clapper, originator of the term "smoke-filled room"^[2]
• Richard Cohen, Washington Post columnist
• Charles Collingwood, CBS News anchor, host of A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy
• Gail Collins, New York Times columnist
• Marie Colvin, long-time war correspondent for The Sunday Times
• Bob Considine, author of Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and ABC and CBS radio anchor
• Kent Cooper, who later became the longtime GM of rival Associated Press
• Walter Cronkite, long-time anchor of the CBS Evening News
• Bill Downs, CBS and ABC reporter, first to deliver a live broadcast from Normandy after D-Day
• Allen Drury, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist
• Stephen Early, White House Press Secretary for Franklin D. Roosevelt
• Marc S. Ellenbogen, President, The Prague Society for International Cooperation; Chair, Global Panel Foundation
• Oscar Fraley, Untouchables co-author
• Thomas Friedman, Three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist
• Joseph L. Galloway, military author
• Martha Gellhorn, legendary war correspondent
• Carmen Gentile, award-winning journalist, author and founder of Postindustrial Media
• Henry Tilton Gorrell, filed first report on D-Day
• Richard Helms, onetime CIA Director, who interviewed Adolf Hitler for United Press during the 1936 Olympics^[30]
• Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter for The New York Times, the AP and The New Yorker
• Don Hewitt, 60 Minutes creator and producer; worked for UP Newspictures predecessor Acme Newsphotos^[14][17]
• Tony Hillerman, novelist^[31]
• Les Hinton, ex-Dow Jones CEO
• Richard C. Hottelet, CBS News United Nations correspondent, last-surviving of the Murrow Boys
• Brit Hume, ABC News White House Correspondent and Fox News anchor
• David Hume Kennerly, 1970s White House photographer
• Edward M. Korry, U.S. Ambassador to Ethiopia and Chile
• Brian Lamb, C-SPAN founder
• Larry LeSueur, CBS News and Voice of America White House Correspondent, two-time Peabody Award winner
• Elmer Lower, early ABC News president^[32]
• Eugene Lyons, former UP correspondent to Moscow, first Western journalist to interview Joseph Stalin
• Jim McGlincy, reporter for the New York Post, New York Daily News, Newsweek and CBS News
• Laurence Meredith, UPI international correspondent, UPI Portugal Manager, Royal Air Force veteran.
• Knowlton Nash, Canadian journalist, senior anchor of CBC Television's flagship news program, The National
• Ron Nessen, White House Press Secretary for Gerald Ford^[33]
• Edwin Newman, CBS and NBC anchor, moderator of 1976 and 1984 presidential debates
• Keith Olbermann, correspondent and host for CNN, ESPN, MSNBC, Current TV, and GQ magazine
• Eugene Patterson, Pulitzer Prize–winning newspaper editor and columnist
• Marjorie Paxson, influential women's page editor
• Doc Quigg, journalist
• George Reedy, White House Press Secretary for Lyndon Johnson
• Harrison Salisbury, Pulitzer-Prize winner, creator of The New York Times op-ed page
• Reese Schonfeld, co-founder of CNN
• Robert J. Serling, novelist and brother of Rod Serling
• Eric Sevareid, CBS News reporter, three-time Peabody Award winner
• Neil Sheehan, reporter who broke the Pentagon Papers story for The New York Times
• Lewis Shollenberger, CBS News reporter, ABC News, Director of Radio Liberty
• Daniel Silva, novelist and former CNN producer
• H. Allen Smith, best-selling author
• Howard K. Smith, ABC Evening News anchor
• Stan Stearns, photographer, known for picture of John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father's casket
• Cyrus Leo Sulzberger II, Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter for The New York Times
• Helen Thomas, UPI reporter from 1943 until 2000 - UPI White House Correspondent from 1961 until 2000
• Stanley Tretick, founding photographer, People magazine
• Hubert van Es, Saigon evacuation photographer
• Kate Webb, war correspondent, first to reach Saigon during Tet Offensive
• Wee Kim Wee, 4th President of Singapore
• Weegee, Naked City photographer
• Paul White, the founding director of CBS News
• Steve Wilstein, who later broke the steroids scandals in baseball for the AP

UPI reporters and photographers have won ten Pulitzer Prizes:

• Russell Jones (International Reporting, 1957)
• Andrew Lopez (News Photography, 1960)
• Yasushi Nagao (News Photography, 1961)
• Merriman Smith (National Reporting, 1964)
• Kyoichi Sawada (News Photography, 1966)
• Toshio Sakai (Feature Photography, 1968)
• Lucinda Franks and Thomas Powers (National Reporting, 1971)
• David Hume Kennerly (Feature Photography, 1972)
• John H. Blair (Spot News Photography, 1978)
• Jahangir Razmi, (Spot News Photography, 1980)^[34]

Discover more about Notable alumni related topics

James Atherton (photographer)

James Atherton (photographer)

James Kenneth Ward Atherton, was a press photographer active in Washington D.C. for over forty years.

David Belnap

David Belnap

David Foster Belnap was an American journalist, foreign correspondent, director of Latin American press services for United Press International (UPI) and Foreign Desk Editor of the Los Angeles Times. He won the 1970 Ed Stout Award of the Overseas Press Club for his series of articles on political changes in Chile and the Maria Moors Cabot Prize from Columbia University in 1973 for his Latin American coverage.

Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles Times, abbreviated as LA Times, is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the Los Angeles suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the United States. The publication has won more than 40 Pulitzer Prizes. It is owned by Patrick Soon-Shiong and published by the Times Mirror Company. The newspaper's coverage has evolved more recently away from U.S. and international headlines and toward emphasizing California and especially Southern California stories.

Jack Berry (journalist)

Jack Berry (journalist)

John Thomas Berry is an American sports journalist. A native of Detroit, he graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in journalism, and wrote for the school's student newspaper, The State News. He was a correspondent for United Press International at the bureau in Lansing, Michigan, before working on the sports staff of the Detroit Free Press. He served as president of the Professional Hockey Writers' Association in 1971, then worked at The Detroit News from 1971 to 1993. As a golf correspondent and author of the "Golf Page", he covered more than 70 major golf championships during his career.

Lansing, Michigan

Lansing, Michigan

Lansing is the capital of the U.S. state of Michigan. It is mostly in Ingham County, although portions of the city extend west into Eaton County and north into Clinton County. The 2020 census placed the city's population at 112,644, making it the sixth largest city in Michigan. The population of its metropolitan statistical area (MSA) was 541,297 at the 2020 census, the third largest in the state after metropolitan Detroit and Grand Rapids. It was named the new state capital of Michigan in 1847, ten years after Michigan became a state.

Arnaud de Borchgrave

Arnaud de Borchgrave

Arnaud Charles Paul Marie Philippe de Borchgrave was a Belgian-American journalist who specialized in international politics. Following a long career with the news magazine Newsweek, covering 17 wars in 30 years as a foreign correspondent, he held key editorial and executive positions with The Washington Times and United Press International. Borchgrave was also a founding member of Newsmax Media.

Elvis Presley

Elvis Presley

Elvis Aaron Presley, often referred to mononymously as Elvis, was an American singer, actor and sergeant in the United States Army. Dubbed the "King of Rock and Roll", he is regarded as one of the most significant cultural figures of the 20th century. His energized interpretations of songs and sexually provocative performance style, combined with a singularly potent mix of influences across color lines during a transformative era in race relations, led him to both great success and initial controversy.

David Brinkley

David Brinkley

David McClure Brinkley was an American newscaster for NBC and ABC in a career lasting from 1943 to 1997.

Lucien Carr

Lucien Carr

Lucien Carr was a key member of the original New York City circle of the Beat Generation in the 1940s; later he worked for many years as an editor for United Press International.

Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions.

Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac

Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.

Beat Generation

Beat Generation

The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-war era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Generationers in the 1950s, better known as Beatniks. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.

• In 1908, UP began offering feature stories and using reporter bylines.^[35]
• In 1915, UP begins to use teleprinters, more recently known as Teletype machines.^[2]
• In the 1930s and 1940s, UP Newspictures predecessor agency Acme developed the International Unifax machine, the first automatic picture receiver.^[36]
• The "Ocean Press", a news service for ocean liners, was founded in the 1930s, as a corporate subsidiary of Scripps. It used copy from United Press and later United Press International. By 1959, it had 125 subscriber ships.^[16]
• In 1935, UP was the first major news service to offer news to broadcasters.^[37]
• In 1945, UP offered the first all-sports wire.^[38]
• In 1948, UP started the first international television news film service. Originally named "UP Movietone", in view of a partnership with the Movietone News service of 20th Century Fox, it went through several partnerships and name changes and was known as United Press International Television News or simply as UPITN, a name which also credited UPI's film and video service partner at the time, Britain's ITN television news service.^[38]
• In 1951, UP offered the first teletypesetter (TTS) service, enabling newspapers to automatically set and justify type from wire transmissions.^[38]
• In 1952 UP, absorbed the Scripps-owned Acme photo service to form UP Newspictures
• In 1958 United Press absorbed Hearst's INS to create UPI
• In 1958, UPI created the first wire service audio network, an offshoot of the film service above. UPI Audio provided news material to radio stations. It was renamed United Press International Radio Network in 1983.^[18][38]
• In 1974, UPI launched the first "high-speed" data newswire—operating at 1,200 WPM.
• In 1978, UPI launched the first cable TV news network, UPI Newstime, using SSTV technology via satellite to relay the channel to cable TV companies nationwide in the USA.
• In 1979, UPI along with Telecomputing Corp. of America began making the UPI world news report available to owners of home computers.^[39]
• In 1982, UPI pioneered a coding system allowing clients to choose stories based on topic, subtopic and location.^[40]

Discover more about Key UP/UPI product and technical innovation dates related topics

Byline

Byline

The byline on a newspaper or magazine article gives the name of the writer of the article. Bylines are commonly placed between the headline and the text of the article, although some magazines place bylines at the bottom of the page to leave more room for graphical elements around the headline.

Teleprinter

Teleprinter

A teleprinter is an electromechanical device that can be used to send and receive typed messages through various communications channels, in both point-to-point and point-to-multipoint configurations. Initially they were used in telegraphy, which developed in the late 1830s and 1840s as the first use of electrical engineering, though teleprinters were not used for telegraphy until 1887 at the earliest. The machines were adapted to provide a user interface to early mainframe computers and minicomputers, sending typed data to the computer and printing the response. Some models could also be used to create punched tape for data storage and to read back such tape for local printing or transmission.

Ocean liner

Ocean liner

An ocean liner is a type of passenger ship primarily used for transportation across seas or oceans. Ocean liners may also carry cargo or mail, and may sometimes be used for other purposes. Only one ocean liner remains in service today.

Broadcasting

Broadcasting

Broadcasting is the distribution of audio or video content to a dispersed audience via any electronic mass communications medium, but typically one using the electromagnetic spectrum, in a one-to-many model. Broadcasting began with AM radio, which came into popular use around 1920 with the spread of vacuum tube radio transmitters and receivers. Before this, most implementations of electronic communication were one-to-one, with the message intended for a single recipient. The term broadcasting evolved from its use as the agricultural method of sowing seeds in a field by casting them broadly about. It was later adopted for describing the widespread distribution of information by printed materials or by telegraph. Examples applying it to "one-to-many" radio transmissions of an individual station to multiple listeners appeared as early as 1898.

Movietone News

Movietone News

Movietone News is a newsreel that ran from 1928 to 1963 in the United States. Under the name British Movietone News, it also ran in the United Kingdom from 1929 to 1986, in France also produced by Fox-Europa, in Australia and New Zealand until 1970, and Germany as Fox Tönende Wochenschau.

United Press International Television News

United Press International Television News

United Press International Television News, abbreviated as UPITN, was a television news agency, operating from 1967 to 1985. It was the successor to earlier UPI television news film operations United Press Movietone and United Press International Newsfilm. It was at the forefront of international television newsgathering and had a vast network of foreign bureaus around the world with film crews capturing images of the events and people that defined the era.

ITN

ITN

Independent Television News (ITN) is a UK-based media production and broadcast journalism company. ITN is based in London, with bureaux and offices in Beijing, Brussels, Jerusalem, Johannesburg, New York, Paris, Sydney and Washington, D.C.

United Press International Radio Network

United Press International Radio Network

Originally named "UPI Audio," the United Press International Radio Network was a news service for radio and television stations from wire service United Press International. It was the first such service offered by a major news agency and existed from 1958 to 1999.

UPI Newstime

UPI Newstime

UPI Newstime was a cable television network founded by United Press International in 1978, and premiering July 3 of that year. UPI Newstime was the second 24-hour all-news television network in the US for cable TV, following AP Newscable for 13 years and predating CNN by 2 years. UPI Newstime was unique in how it distributed its programming to local cable TV (CATV) headends via satellite, using a form of slow-scan television, or SSTV technology. Using SSTV reduced satellite transmission costs for UPI and was suitable at the time for the programming produced by UPI for the channel, which mainly relied on still slides and wirephotos acquired by UPI's own newsgathering operations.

Slow-scan television

Slow-scan television

Slow-scan television (SSTV) is a picture transmission method, used mainly by amateur radio operators, to transmit and receive static pictures via radio in monochrome or color.