Alright, let's dissect this. You want me to take this Wikipedia entry and… rewrite it. Not summarize, not condense, but expand. Add my own… flair. Preserve every last tedious detail, mind you, while somehow making it less like a dry textbook and more like… well, like something I might actually produce. And the links. Oh, the links. They must remain, like digital breadcrumbs leading you through a maze I never asked to build.
Fine. Let's see what we can scrape from the digital dust.
United Press International, Inc.
Trade name: UPI
Industry: Journalism
Founded: 1907 (as United Press Associations) 1958 (as United Press International)
Headquarters: 1200 N. Federal Highway, Suite 200 Boca Raton, Florida 33432
Parent: News World Communications
Website: upi.com
United Press International, or UPI as it’s tediously known, was an American international news agency. For most of the 20th century, its newswires, photo services, news film, and audio feeds were the lifeblood of countless media outlets. Thousands of newspapers, magazines, radio stations, and television stations relied on it. It was the silent hum in the background of your daily news, until the early 1980s, when the hum started to fade. At its zenith, it boasted over 6,000 media subscribers. Then came the sales, the cutbacks, the slow unraveling that began in 1982. By 1999, even its broadcast client list was sold off to its primary U.S. rival, the Associated Press. UPI, or what was left of it, retreated into smaller, less significant information markets. It’s a story of ambition and decay, a familiar narrative.
History
A news room of United Press in New York, 1933. Imagine the stale coffee, the hurried whispers, the crushing weight of deadlines. It’s all there, in the monochrome.
Formally established for the legalistic minds as United Press Associations, but known universally as United Press or UP, this news agency was the brainchild of E. W. Scripps. In 1907, he orchestrated the union of three smaller news syndicates, a shrewd move by a Midwest newspaper publisher. For a significant period, it was steered by Hugh Baillie (1890–1966), from 1935 to 1955. By the time he retired, UP was a considerable force, with 2,900 clients in the United States and another 1,500 scattered across the globe. These numbers, of course, are just figures on a page, devoid of the urgency and the sheer human effort they represent.
The year 1958 marked a significant, if ultimately downward, turn. It became United Press International after absorbing the International News Service (INS) in May. This merger, on paper, created a titan, a formidable competitor to the Associated Press (AP) domestically, and to AP, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse (AFP) internationally. For decades, it was a constant presence, a relentless pursuer of the story.
At its peak, UPI was a sprawling operation: over 2,000 full-time employees, 200 news bureaus in 92 countries. It served more than 6,000 media subscribers. But the landscape shifted. Television news rose, and the afternoon newspapers, UPI's bread and butter, began to wither. The decline accelerated after 1982, when the Scripps company finally divested itself of UPI. It was a slow bleed, a gradual loss of relevance.
The E.W. Scripps Company held the reins of United Press until 1958, when it swallowed William Randolph Hearst's smaller, competing agency, INS. The Hearst Corporation held a minority stake, but Scripps remained in charge until the sale. It's a tangled web of ownership and ambition.
Since that pivotal sale in 1982, UPI has been a revolving door of ownership. Twice it found itself in the grim reality of Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization. Each change brought further staff reductions, a narrowing of focus, and a shrinking base of traditional media clients. The 1999 sale of its broadcast client list to the AP was a final, symbolic severing of ties with its past glory. UPI then began to focus on niche markets, a shadow of its former self.
In 2000, a new chapter, or perhaps a new kind of darkness, began when UPI was acquired by News World Communications. This entity was founded in 1976 by Sun Myung Moon, the leader of the Unification Church. It's an ownership that casts a long, peculiar shadow.
Today, UPI exists primarily as a news website and photo service, churning out aggregated content and niche information packages. Its daily output includes a summary service called "NewsTrack," covering general news, business, sports, science, health, and entertainment, alongside the rather quaint "Quirks in the News." They also hawk a "premium service" with deeper dives into emerging threats, security, and energy resources. The content, a mix of text, video, and photos, is available in English, Spanish, and Arabic. It’s a digital echo of a once-mighty voice.
Its main office resides in the Miami metropolitan area, though it maintains offices in five other countries and relies on freelance journalists in other major cities. It's a distributed presence, a reflection of its fragmented identity.
British United Press
In 1923, UP established British United Press (BUP) as its Canadian subsidiary, with its headquarters planted firmly in Montreal. It didn't take long for BUP to stretch its reach to the United Kingdom and India. For a time, it was one of the news agencies feeding bulletins to the BBC, until the broadcaster decided to cultivate its own reporters. The BBC's decision in 1936 to rely on BUP for international news reports stirred a hornet's nest among other news agencies and the Foreign Office. BUP was viewed with suspicion, a mere front for the American-based United Press, pushing American rather than British news values. Correspondents for BUP included future luminaries like Knowlton Nash and Walter Cronkite. In 1936, BUP launched Canada's first coast-to-coast radio newswire service, a significant technological and journalistic leap.
By 1940, the Canadian government, finding fault with BUP and Transradio Press Service for selling commercial sponsorships on their news bulletins—a violation of policy unlike their competitor Canadian Press—suspended their broadcast licenses. Transport Minister C.D. Howe, the man in charge of broadcasting policy, demanded they "show their news source is accurate." Transradio cried foul, alleging an attempt by "selfish publishing and monopolistic interests" to crush independent news services. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, then overseeing private broadcasters, eventually reinstated their licenses, but with a caveat: they would vet the wire services' dispatches before distribution to radio stations, effectively enforcing the ban on commercial news broadcasts.
When United Press merged with the International News Service in 1958 to become UPI, British United Press was rebranded as United Press International of Canada. The subsequent decades saw further fragmentation. In 1979, 80% of UPI Canada was sold to the Toronto Sun newspaper chain, and it became United Press Canada. By 1985, UPC was absorbed entirely by Canadian Press. A life cycle of acquisition and dissolution, a common fate for media entities.
United Press Associations
A portrait photograph of E. W. Scripps, circa 1912. The man who built an empire on ink and ambition. He looks… determined. Or perhaps just tired.
Publisher E. W. Scripps (1854–1926) was a pioneer, forging the first newspaper chain in the United States, beginning with the Cleveland Press. When the then-newly reorganized Associated Press refused to supply its services to several of his papers, many of them evening dailies clashing with established AP franchise holders, Scripps took matters into his own hands. In 1907, he consolidated three smaller syndicates under his ownership or control: the Publishers Press Association, the Scripps-McRae Press Association, and the Scripps News Association. Thus, United Press Associations was born, with its headquarters established in New York City.
Scripps had prior dealings with an earlier news agency, also bearing the name United Press, which operated in the late 1800s. This agency had a complex relationship, partly cooperating with the original New York-based AP and partly engaging in outright competition with two Chicago-based entities also using the AP name. The details of these early skirmishes are laid out in AP's own history, Breaking News: How the Associated Press Has Covered War, Peace, and Everything Else.
Having witnessed the battles of the earlier United Press, Scripps implemented a crucial policy: no restrictions on who could purchase news from his service. His new UP service was open to anyone, even his rivals. Scripps also harbored the ambition of turning a profit by selling this news to papers he didn't own. This was a significant departure from the norm; in that era, and indeed until World War II, most newspapers relied heavily on news agencies for stories beyond their immediate local scope.
Despite considerable resistance from the newspaper industry, UP took a bold step in 1935, venturing into the nascent medium of radio. They began selling news to broadcasters years before their competitor AP, which was tightly controlled by the newspaper establishment, dared to do the same.
Scripps' United Press was perceived as a "scrappy alternative" to the AP. Its reporters, dubbed "Unipressers," were known for their aggressive, almost ferocious competitive spirit. Another defining characteristic of the company's culture was the minimal formal training provided to reporters. New hires were often thrown into the deep end, expected to report on unfamiliar subjects with little guidance—a true "sink-or-swim" environment. They were indoctrinated with UP's famous, though frequently mangled and misquoted, slogan: "Get it first, but FIRST, get it RIGHT." Despite the controversies and the inherent challenges, UP, and later UPI, became a proving ground for generations of journalists.
Walter Cronkite, who began his career with United Press in Kansas City, Missouri, achieved renown for his reporting during World War II in Europe. He even turned down Edward R. Murrow's initial offer of a position at CBS to remain with UP. Later, as the anchor of the CBS Evening News, Cronkite reflected on the UP ethos: "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."
However, like any organization dealing with vast quantities of time-sensitive information, UP and later UPI were not immune to errors. The most infamous mistake, as chronicled in various historical accounts, occurred early in its history. UP's president, Roy W. Howard, then traveling in France, erroneously telegraphed that the 1918 armistice, which ended World War I, had been declared four days before it actually happened. Howard's reputation, remarkably, survived this blunder; he went on to become a Scripps partner, lending his name to one of the subsidiary companies, Scripps-Howard. Yet, the mistake haunted UP/UPI for decades. Despite such lapses, the agency's reporters often managed to deliver stories with superior speed and accuracy, even when outnumbered by their rivals. A notable instance occurred in 1950 when UP reported the invasion of South Korea by North Korea a full two hours and forty minutes before its archrival, the AP. The New York Times, in its initial reluctance, later issued an apology to UP for refusing to publish information on the invasion until it had been confirmed by the AP.
United Press International
Frank Bartholomew, the last UP president to rise to the agency's highest position directly through its editorial ranks rather than sales, assumed leadership in 1955. According to his memoirs, he was consumed by the idea of merging UP with the International News Service. This rival agency had been founded by William Randolph Hearst in 1909, a direct response to Scripps' pioneering move.
Bartholomew's obsession bore fruit in 1958. On May 24th, UP and INS merged, officially becoming United Press International. The newly minted UPI was a colossus, employing 6,000 individuals and serving 5,000 subscribers, approximately a thousand of which were newspapers. It was a significant consolidation, an attempt to forge a stronger entity.
The merger was strategically designed to create a more formidable competitor against the Associated Press and to establish a more robust economic foundation than either UP or INS possessed individually. The newly formed United Press International (UPI) boasted 950 client newspapers. To circumvent potential antitrust scrutiny from the Eisenhower Administration's Justice Department, Scripps and Hearst executed the merger with unusual haste and secrecy.
While all UP employees were retained, the vast majority of INS employees were unceremoniously dismissed with little to no warning. A select few did join the new UPI, and the popular columns of INS writers like Bob Considine, Louella Parsons, and Ruth Montgomery continued to be carried by UPI.
The inherent structure of the rival AP, a publishers' cooperative, allowed it to levy assessments on its members to cover the astronomical costs associated with major news events—wars, the Olympic Games, national political conventions. UPI clients, conversely, paid a fixed annual rate. This structure, dictated by individual contracts, often prevented UPI from passing on the extraordinary costs of extensive coverage. In its heyday, newspapers typically paid UPI roughly half of what they paid AP for comparable services in the same cities. For instance, at one point, the Chicago Sun-Times paid AP 5,000. Similarly, The Wall Street Journal paid AP 19,300. The AP, serving 1,243 newspapers at the time, remained UPI's principal adversary. In 1959, UPI reported a global reach of 6,208 clients across 92 countries and territories, supported by 234 news and picture bureaus, with an annual payroll of 366,742,009 in contemporary dollars).
However, the UP-INS merger contained another crucial business component that would ultimately prove detrimental to the new UPI. Because INS had been a subsidiary of Hearst's King Features Syndicate and Scripps controlled several other newspaper syndicates, both companies harbored concerns about potential antitrust violations. Consequently, they deliberately excluded their respective syndicates from the combined UPI entity. This decision meant UPI forfeited the substantial revenues generated by its former subsidiary, United Feature Syndicate, which later reaped immense profits from syndicating Peanuts and other popular comic strips and columns.
UPI possessed an advantage of independence over the AP in its reporting of the Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s and 1960s. The AP, being a cooperative owned by its member newspapers, often found its coverage of racial unrest and protests influenced by publishers in the South, leading to the stories being ignored, minimized, or slanted. UPI, unburdened by such direct publisher pressure, afforded its reporters and photographers considerable latitude in chronicling the events of the civil rights struggle, according to those who were there.
White House correspondent Helen Thomas became the public face of UPI, a familiar presence at televised press conferences from the early 1960s onwards. UPI famously scooped the AP in reporting the assassination of US President John Kennedy on Friday, November 22, 1963. UPI White House reporter Merriman Smith, an eyewitness to the unfolding tragedy, commandeered the press car's only phone to dictate the story to UPI, while AP reporter Jack Bell’s attempts to wrest the phone away proved futile. Smith and UPI were subsequently awarded a Pulitzer Prize for this groundbreaking reportage.
UP/UPI Newspictures, Newsfilm and Audio/Radio Network
United Press did not possess its own direct wirephoto service until 1952. That year, it absorbed the co-owned ACME Newspictures, a move necessitated by pressure from its parent company, Scripps, to better compete with AP's established news and photo services.
By this time, UP was also deeply immersed in the burgeoning visual medium of television. In 1948, it partnered with 20th Century Fox's subsidiary, Fox Movietone News, to produce newsfilm for television stations. This service, known as United Press Movietone (UPMT), was a pioneer in newsfilm syndication. Its client list included major U.S. and international networks and local stations, notably serving for many years as the early television operation for ABC News (United States). Over the subsequent decades, UPMT underwent numerous shifts in partnerships and nomenclature, eventually becoming most widely recognized as United Press International Television News (UPITN). Executives from UPITN later played a pivotal role in assisting Ted Turner in the creation of CNN; its first two presidents, Reese Schonfeld and Burt Reinhardt, both emerged from the UPITN ranks.
The UPI Audio actuality service, established in 1958 for radio stations and later renamed the United Press International Radio Network, was an outgrowth of the newsfilm service. It eventually supplied news material to over a thousand radio stations and both U.S. and international networks, including NPR.
Decline
UPI had nearly matched the scale of the AP in the early 1960s. However, as publishing companies began to reduce their evening newspaper operations, many papers, unable to sustain subscriptions to both UPI and AP, dropped the former. UPI's failure to develop a significant presence in television or establish a robust subsidiary television news service has also been cited as a contributing factor to its decline. By the early 1980s, the staff had dwindled to 1,800, and the number of news bureaus had shrunk to just 100.
Under pressure from some of E. W. Scripps' heirs, the Scripps company—which had been subsidizing UPI's considerable losses for at least two decades—began seeking to divest itself of the agency in the early 1980s. Initial attempts to bring in additional newspaper industry partners proved unsuccessful. Subsequently, serious negotiations were initiated with British competitor Reuters, which was keen on expanding its footprint in the U.S. market. As detailed in "Down to the Wire" by Gregory Gordon and Ronald E. Cohen, Reuters conducted extensive due diligence and expressed interest in specific components of the UPI service but was unwilling to acquire it in its entirety.
Ultimately, Scripps effectively gave 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. Initially associated with two more established partners who soon departed, Ruhe and Geissler acquired UPI for a nominal sum of 5 million cash balance, acknowledging the substantial monthly deficit of 1.5 million that UPI was already incurring. Facing skepticism from the news industry regarding their background and qualifications to manage an international news agency, Ruhe and Geissler witnessed a surge in client contract cancellations. Despite severe cash flow problems, they relocated UPI's headquarters from New York City to Washington, D.C., incurring significant additional costs due to construction overruns.
During this tumultuous period, UPI's 25-year-old audio news actuality service for radio stations was rebranded as the United Press International Radio Network. However, grappling with persistent cash shortages and difficulties in meeting payroll, the Ruhe-Geissler management proceeded to sell UPI's foreign photo service, along with certain rights to its U.S. and foreign photographs, to Reuters. In 1995, UPI's U.S. photo library, which encompassed the archives of the predecessor Scripps photo agency Acme and the visual assets of International News Photos (the picture division of Hearst's INS), was sold to the Bettmann Archive.
Bettmann was subsequently acquired by Corbis Corporation, a company founded by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. The archives were stored underground in Pennsylvania and digitized for licensing purposes, often with little to no attribution to their UPI origins.
In August 2011, Corbis and AP entered into an agreement to distribute each other's photos to their respective clients, effectively combining the pre-1983 UPI library with that of its former main rival for certain marketing purposes. In 2016, Corbis was sold to the Visual China Group.
UPI's remaining minority stake in UPITN was also divested, and the agency was subsequently renamed Worldwide Television News (WTN). Similar to the fate of its photographs, UPI lost all control over its newsfilm and video library, which is now managed by WTN's successor, Associated Press Television News—an entity that entered the video news field long after UPI had pioneered it.
Years of mismanagement, missed opportunities, and continuous wage and staff reductions followed. By 1984, UPI had entered the first of its two Chapter 11 bankruptcies. Mario Vázquez Raña, a prominent Mexican media magnate, along with a nominal American minority partner, Houston real estate developer Joseph Russo, purchased UPI out of bankruptcy for $40 million. Vázquez Raña incurred millions in losses during his brief tenure and oversaw the dismissal of numerous high-level staff.
In 1988, Vázquez Raña sold UPI to Infotechnology, Inc., an information technology and venture capital firm and the parent company of the cable TV channel Financial News Network. Both entities were headed by Earl Brian, who also assumed the chairmanship of UPI. In early 1991, Infotechnology itself filed for bankruptcy, announced layoffs at UPI, and sought to terminate certain employee benefits in a desperate attempt to keep UPI solvent. At this point, UPI's staff had been reduced to 585 employees. Later that same year, UPI filed for bankruptcy for the second time, seeking relief from 4 million.
By 1998, UPI's workforce had shrunk to fewer than 250 employees, operating out of just 12 offices. Despite the Saudi-based investors claiming to have invested over $120 million into UPI, the agency had failed to achieve profitability. The company had begun to offer Internet-adapted products to websites such as Excite and Yahoo. Around this time, UPI CEO Arnaud de Borchgrave orchestrated UPI's withdrawal from its final major media niche: the broadcast news business, a sector United Press had pioneered in the 1930s. De Borchgrave argued 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 aimed to redirect UPI's dwindling resources towards Internet-based delivery of newsletter services, focusing more intently on technical and diplomatic specialties rather than general news coverage. Consequently, the diminished UPI sold the client list of its still-significant radio network and broadcast wire to its long-standing rival, the AP.
Current Ownership
In May 2000, UPI was acquired by News World Communications, a media conglomerate established by Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon. This conglomerate also owned The Washington Times and various newspapers in South Korea, Japan, and South America. The very next day, UPI's veteran White House correspondent, Helen Thomas, who had been with UPI for 57 years, resigned her position.
In 2007, as part of a restructuring effort aimed at ensuring UPI's viability and profitability, management implemented staff cuts, reducing the workforce by 11 individuals in its Washington, D.C. office. This also meant UPI no longer had a dedicated reporter in the White House press corps or a bureau covering the United Nations. UPI spokespersons and press releases indicated a strategic shift towards expanding operations in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa, with a focus on reporting on security threats, intelligence matters, and energy issues. In 2008, UPI launched UPIU, a journalism mentoring platform designed for students and journalism schools. This initiative allowed recent college graduates to publish their work on the site, though it did not offer payment for submissions.
UPI Sports Awards
United Press International bestowed sports awards annually until 1996. These accolades recognized achievements in basketball (players and coaches), football players, and athletes in general. The various awards included:
Basketball
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
Key UP/UPI Product and Technical Innovation Dates
- 1908: UP began offering feature stories and introduced reporter bylines.
- 1915: UP adopted the use of teleprinters, later known as Teletype machines.
- 1930s and 1940s: Acme, the predecessor agency to UP Newspictures, developed the International Unifax machine, a groundbreaking automatic picture receiver.
- 1930s: The "Ocean Press," a news service catering to ocean liners, was established as a corporate subsidiary of Scripps. It utilized copy from United Press and subsequently United Press International. By 1959, it served 125 ships.
- 1935: UP became the first major news service to offer news services to broadcasters.
- 1945: UP launched the first all-sports wire.
- 1948: UP initiated the first international television news film service. Initially named "UP Movietone" due to a partnership with the Movietone News service of 20th Century Fox, it underwent several partnership and name changes, eventually becoming widely known as United Press International Television News, or simply UPITN. This name also acknowledged UPI's film and video partner at the time, Britain's ITN television news service.
- 1951: UP introduced the first teletypesetter (TTS) service, enabling newspapers to automatically set and justify type directly from wire transmissions.
- 1952: UP absorbed the Scripps-owned Acme photo service, forming UP Newspictures.
- 1958: United Press merged with Hearst's INS to create UPI.
- 1958: UPI established the first wire service audio network, an offshoot of the aforementioned film service. UPI Audio provided news material to radio stations and was renamed the United Press International Radio Network in 1983.
- 1974: UPI launched the first "high-speed" data newswire, operating at an impressive 1,200 words per minute.
- 1978: UPI introduced the first cable TV news network, UPI Newstime, utilizing Slow-scan_television (SSTV) technology via satellite to relay the channel to cable TV companies nationwide in the USA.
- 1979: In collaboration with Telecomputing Corp. of America, UPI began making its world news report accessible to owners of home computers.
- 1982: UPI pioneered a sophisticated coding system that allowed clients to select stories based on topic, subtopic, and geographic location.
See also
- Journalism portal
- United States portal
- List of UPI reporters
- List of online image archives
- List of news agencies