United Press International ( UPI ) is an international news agency whose new news, photographs, news films and audio services provide news material to thousands of newspapers, magazines and radio stations and television for most of the 20th century. At its peak, it has over 6,000 media subscribers. Due to the first of several sales and staff reductions in 1982, and sales of 1999 list of broadcast clients to its rival, Associated Press, UPI has concentrated on smaller niche information markets.
Video United Press International
History
The official name of the "United Nations Press Association" for mergers and legal purposes, but known and publicly identified as United Press or UP news was created in 1907 bringing together three smaller news syndicates by Midwest publisher EW Scripps. It was led by Hugh Baillie (1890-1966) 1935-1955. Upon retirement, UP has 2,900 clients in the United States, and 1,500 overseas.
In 1958 became United Press International after absorbing International News Service (INS). Either UP or UPI, this agency is one of the largest newswire services in the world, competing domestically for about 90 years with Associated Press and internationally with AP, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse.
At its peak, UPI has more than 2,000 full-time employees; and 200 news agencies in 92 countries; it has more than 6,000 media subscribers. With the increasing popularity of television news, UPI's business began to decline as the afternoon newspaper circulation, the main client category, began to fall. The decline accelerated after the sale of UPI in 1982 by the Scripps company.
The E.W. Scripps Company controlled United Press until its absorption from the smaller competitor William Randolph Hearst, INS, in 1958 to form UPI. With Hearst Corporation as a minority partner, UPI continued to be under Scripps management until 1982.
Since its sale in 1982, UPI has changed ownership several times and twice in Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization. With every change in ownership comes more in service and staff reductions and the appropriate focus and depreciation shift from its traditional media subscriber base. Since the 1999 sales list of broadcast clients to a one-time main rival, AP, UPI has concentrated on smaller niche information markets. It no longer serves media organizations in a big way.
In 2000, UPI was purchased by News World Communications, an international news media company founded in 1976 by Unification Church leader Sun Myung Moon.
It now maintains news websites and photo services and electronically publishes several product information packages. Mostly based on aggregation from other sources on the Web and collected by small editorial staff and stringer, the daily content of UPI consists of a brief news brief service called "NewsTrack," which includes general reports, business, sports, science, health and entertainment, and "Habit in the News." It also sells premium services, which have deeper coverage and analysis of emerging threats, security industry, and energy resources. UPI content is presented in text, video and photo formats, in English, Spanish and Arabic.
UPI's main office is in the Miami metropolitan area and maintains office locations in five other countries and uses freelance journalists in other major cities.
United Persatuan Union
Starting with Cleveland Press , publisher E. W. Scripps (1854-1926) made the first newspaper chain in the United States. Since the recently reorganized Associated Press refused to sell its services to some of its papers, most of them were daily afternoons in competition with existing AP franchisees, in 1907 Scripps merged three smaller syndicates under its ownership or control, Publisher Press Association, Scripps-McRae Press Association, and Scripps News Association, to form United Press Associations, with headquarters in New York City.
Scripps had been a customer of the previous news agency, also called United Press, that existed in the late 1800s, partly in collaboration with the original New York AP management and partly in existential competition with two organizations based in Chicago also uses the name of the AP (as detailed in the Associated Press and in the history of AP 2007, Breaking News: How the Related Press Has Covered War, Peace, and Other Things, cited below).
Taking heed of the battles between the previous United Press and various APs, Scripps requires that there are no restrictions on who can buy news from the news service, and he makes the new UP service available to anyone, including his competitors. Scripps also hopes to make a profit from selling the news to someone else's newspaper. At that time and until World War II, most newspapers rely on news agencies for stories outside of their geographical area.
Despite strong newspaper industry opposition, the UP began selling news to new and competitive radio media in 1935, the year before AP's competitors, controlled by the newspaper industry, did the same.
Scripps' United Press is considered a source of "fighting alternative" news to AP. UP reporters are called "Unipressers" and noted for their aggressive and competitive streak. UP (and later UPI) became a common training ground for the generation of journalists.
Walter Cronkite, who started with United Press in Kansas City, gained fame for his coverage of World War II in Europe and rejected Edward R. Murrow's first offer from a CBS job to stay with UP, but who later continued with CBS Evening News , once said, "I feel every Unipresser wakes up in the morning by saying, 'This is the day I will beat the AP from hell.' It's part of the spirit We know we do not move, but we know we can do a good job though, and often, we do it. "
Another distinctive feature of corporate culture is that there is little formal training for journalists; New employees are often put into "sink or swim" situations to report unknown subjects. However, UP/UPI serves as a training ground for generations of journalists.
They are weaned on well-known and well-documented slogans (albeit often misused and misquoted), "Get first, but FIRST, get REALLY."
Nonetheless, like all agencies dealing with large volumes of timely information, UP and UPI then have a share of the mistakes it remembers. As told in the various printed histories of UPI cited below, the most famous came at the beginning of its history. UP president, Roy Howard, then traveled in France, sending a telegraph that the 1918 ceasefire that ended World War I was declared four days before it happened. Howard's reputation persisted and he later became Scripps's partner, whose name appeared in one of Scripps's Scripps-Howard subsidiaries. But errors that spread UP/UPI from generation to generation. However, agency reporters can often tell the story more quickly and accurately even though they are usually outnumbered by competition. In 1950, for example, the UP reported a North Korean invasion by North Korea two hours and forty minutes before his departure, AP. The New York Times later apologized to the UP for refusing to print information about the invasion until the AP confirmed it.
United Press International
Frank Bartholomew, the last UP president who rose to the top positions of the agency directly from news, rather than sales, promoted, took over in 1955, and according to his autobiography quoted obsessed to merge UP with International News Service, an agency news set up by William Randolph Hearst in 1909 followed the Scripps trail.
Bartholomew successfully put "I" in UPI on May 24, 1958, when UP and INS joined United Press International. The new UPI now has 6,000 employees and 5,000 subscribers, about a thousand of them newspapers.
This merger aims to create a stronger competitor for the Associated Press and a stronger economic entity than the UP or INS. The newly formed United Press International (UPI) has 950 client newspapers. Fearing anti-trust issues with Eisenhower's Department of Justice, Scripps and Hearst speed up the merging through unusual speed and secrecy.
Although all UP employees are retained, most INS employees lose their jobs practically without warning. Relative numbers join the new UPI and popular INS author fields, such as Bob Considine, Louella Parsons and Ruth Montgomery, brought by UPI.
AP rivals are publishers' co-operatives and can judge their members to help pay extraordinary costs for covering headlines - war, Olympics, national political conventions. In contrast, UPI clients pay an annual fixed rate; depending on individual contracts, UPI can not always ask them to help bear the expense of extraordinary coverage. In its heyday, newspapers usually pay UPI about half of what they pay APs in the same city for the same service: At one point, for example, the Chicago Sun-Times paid AP $ 12,500 a week, but UPI is only $ 5,000; Wall Street Journal pays AP $ 36,000 per week, but UPI is only $ 19,300. The AP, which serves 1,243 newspapers at the time, remains a major competitor of UPI. In 1959, UPI had 6,208 clients in 92 countries and territories, 234 news and image agencies, and an annual salary of $ 34,000,000 ($ 285,429,224) in today's dollars.
But UP-INS mergers involve other business components that are harming new UPI companies in recent years. Since INS has become a subsidiary of Hearst's King Features Syndicate and Scripps controlling several other newspaper syndicates, both companies are afraid of possible anti-trust issues. So they deliberately keep each syndicate from a joint company UPI. The move imposes on UPI the income of a previous subsidiary of United Feature Syndicate, which in subsequent years generated substantial profits on Peanuts syndication and other popular comic strips and columns.
UPI has the advantage of independence over the AP in reporting the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Because AP is a cooperative basically owned by newspapers, they in the South affect their coverage of riots and racial protests, often ignoring, minimizing, or doubling the reporting. UPI did not have that kind of pressure, and management, according to UPI journalists and photographers on that day, gave them plenty of freedom in recording the events of civil rights struggles.
White House reporter Helen Thomas became UPI's public face, as she was seen at a televised press conference that began in the early 1960s. UPI famously scooped the AP in reporting the assassination of US President John Kennedy on Friday, November 22, 1963. White House reporter Merriman Smith was an eyewitness, and he confiscated a car phone only to dictate the story to UPI as AP journalist Jack Bell tried - without success - to grab the phone so he can call his office. Smith and UPI won the Pulitzer Prize for this reporting. UP/UPI Newspictures, Newsfilm and Audio/Radio Network
United Press did not have direct wirefot service until 1952, when it absorbed the jointly owned ACME Newspictures, under pressure from its parent company Scripps to better compete with news and AP photo services.
At that time, UP was also deeply involved with new visual media from television. In 1948, he signed a partnership with 20th Century Fox, Fox Movietone News, to make a news film for television stations. The service, United Press Movietone, or UPMT, is a pioneer in news movie syndicates and numbers among its major US and foreign network clients as well as local stations, including over the years at the start of ABC News's TV operations. In subsequent decades, he experienced some changes in partnership and name, becoming known as United Press International Television News (UPITN). Senior UPITN executives then helped Ted Turner set up CNN, with two of his first presidents, Reese Schonfeld and Burt Reinhardt, coming from the UPITN.
The UPI Audio actuality service for radio stations, created in 1958 and later renamed United Press International Radio Network, is a spin-off of the newsfilm service and ultimately provides news material to over a thousand US and foreign radio and network stations, including NPR.
Decline
UPI almost equaled the size of the AP in the early 1960s, but as the publishing companies began to reduce their evening paper, the letter was dropped by letters that could no longer subscribe to UPI and AP. UPI's failure to expand the presence of television or children's television news services has also been cited as one of the causes of its decline. In the early 1980s, the number of staff dropped to 1,800 and there were only 100 news agencies.
Under pressure from some of E. W. Scripps's heirs, the Scripps company, which has been costing UPI for at least two decades of losses, began trying to divert UPI control in the early 1980s. He tried to bring in additional newspaper industry partners and then failed, engaging in serious negotiations with British rival Reuters, who wanted to increase his presence in the United States. As described in "Down to the Wire," by Gordon and Cohen, quoted below, Reuters conducted extensive due diligence and expressed an interest in the part of the UPI service, but did not want to keep it fully.
Scripps eventually gave the agency to two inexperienced businessmen, Douglas Ruhe (son of David Ruhe, member of Universal House of Justice, supreme body of BahÃÆ'¡'ÃÆ' Faith) and William Geissler, who was originally associated with two of the better. known partner, who left immediately. Ruhe and Geissler earned UPI for $ 1. Under the terms of the purchase agreement, Scripps first injected UPI with a $ 5 million cash balance, which compared to $ 1.0 - $ 1.5 million per month that UPI had lost. Facing the news industry's skepticism about their background and qualifications for running international news agencies, Ruhe and Geissler witnessed an increase in contract cancellations. Despite serious cash flow problems, they moved UPI headquarters from New York City to Washington, DC, incurring a large additional cost due to the construction cost swelling.
During this period, UPI's 25th year audio news actuality service for radio stations was renamed to United Press International Radio Network. But faced with recurring cash shortages and difficulty meeting salaries, Ruhe-Geissler's management sells UPI's foreign photo services and some rights for US and foreign photos to Reuters news agency. It also sells UPI photo libraries in the US, which include archives from Acme's predecessor Scripps photo agency and images and negatives from International News Photos, an INS Hearst image component to Bettman Archive. Bettman was then sold to Corbis Corporation, the founder of Microsoft, separate from Bill Gates, kept it underground in Pennsylvania and digitized them for licenses, often without any notation from their UPI origin. In August 2011, Corbis announced an agreement with AP to distribute each photo to their clients, effectively incorporating a pre-1983 UPI library with libraries from its former major rivals for multiple marketing purposes. In 2016 Corbis is sold to Visual China Group.
The UPI office in London was created during a merger with INP in 1958, before the UP had no base in the UK, and also joined the agency Planet News est.1927. The UPI London office is the initial victim in the decrease in UPI and assets, including the photo archive, sold c.1970. TopFoto is the latest owner of the photo and copyright archive of UPI London photo agency.
The remaining minority holdings of UPI in UPITN are also sold and the agency is renamed Worldwide Television News (WTN). Like his photographs, UPI thereby lost all control of its newsfilm and video library, now held by the WTN-Associated Press Television News successor, who entered the field of video news shortly after UPI left it.
Years of mismanagement, loss of opportunity and constant wages and staffing cuts followed. In 1984, UPI went down to the first division of two Chapter 11 bankruptcies. Mario VÃÆ'¡zquez RaÃÆ' Â ± a, a Mexican media persona, with an American minority partner, Houston real estate developer Joseph Russo, purchased UPI from a $ 40 million bankruptcy, lost millions during his brief tenure, and fired many high-level staff.
In 1988, VÃÆ'¡zquez RaÃÆ' Â ± was sold UPI to Infotechnology, Inc., an information technology and venture capital and parent company of the TV Cable News Network, both led by Earl Brian, who is also chairman of UPI. In early 1991, Infotechnology itself filed for bankruptcy, announcing layoffs in UPI and attempting to terminate certain employee benefits in an effort to keep UPI current. At that point, UPI dropped to 585 employees. Later that year, UPI filed for bankruptcy for the second time, requesting a waiver of $ 50 million in debt so it could be sold. In 1992, a group of Saudi investors, ARA Group International (AGI), purchased a bankrupt UPI of $ 4 million.
In 1998, UPI has fewer than 250 employees and 12 offices. Although Saudi-based investors claim to have poured more than $ 120 million into UPI, it failed to make a profit. Companies have started selling products that are adapted to the Internet to websites like Excite and Yahoo. At that point, UPI CEO Arnaud de Borchgrave arranged UPI's release from its last major media niche, the news business broadcast by United Press had begun in the 1930s. De Borchgrave stated that "what a brilliantly pioneering work on the part of the UPI before World War II, with radio news, is now a static quantity and as far as I'm concerned, it certainly does not fit my plans for the future." He sought to shift the diminishing resources into the delivery of Internet-based newsletters, focusing more on technical and diplomatic specialties than on general news. The UPI rump so that it sells clients lists of radio networks that are still significant and broadcast wire to its former rival, AP.
Despite losing a long battle with the Associated Press, United Press International's legacy was recognized by AP when it made the UPI spell "get it first but do it right" a cornerstone of the branding campaign launched at ap.org.
Current ownership
UPI was purchased in May 2000 by News World Communications, a media conglomerate founded by Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon, who also owns The Washington Times and various newspapers in South Korea, Japan and South America. The next day, UPI White House correspondent, Helen Thomas, resigned his position, having worked for UPI for 57 years.
In 2007 as part of a restructuring to keep UPI in business and profitable, management cut 11 staff from its office in Washington, D.C. and no longer has a reporter in the White House press corps or bureau that includes the United Nations. UPI spokespersons and press releases say the company will focus on expanding operations in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa, and reporting on security threats, intelligence and energy issues. In 2008, UPI started UPIU, a journalistic mentoring platform for students and journalism schools, which allowed new college graduates to post their work on the site, but did not pay for the story.
In March 2017, the organization is headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida, with additional offices in Seoul, South Korea; Beirut, Lebanon; Tokyo and Hong Kong. The Santiago, Chile office closed on 1 November 2014.
It still operates the Washington D.C. Bureau.
Maps United Press International
UPI sports award
United Press International gives sports awards every year until 1996. Awards are awarded to basketball players, basketball coaches, soccer players and athletes in general. Different awards are:
- UPI Athletes of the Year
Basket
- UPI Best Basketball Coach of the Year
- UPI High School Basketball Players of the Year
Football
- This year's UPI University Football Players
- UPI College Lineman of the Year
- UPI NFC Player of the Year
- AFI-AFC AFI Player of the Year
- UPI NFL Rookie of the Year
- UPI NFL Player of the Year
Famous Alumni
Although many normal newsroom jobs are slightly publicized, many UP/UPI news staff have gained notoriety, either with the agency or in the next career. They include journalists, news executives, novelists and high-ranking government officials.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
0 Comments