UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL (UPI)
For decades United Press (and its successor United Press
International) was known as the innovative, aggressive
wire service. UPI emphasized crisp, sharp writing and it
pioneered a separate news wire for broadcast and an audio
service for radio stations. Its correspondents were young
and hard driving.
News agencies like United Press International and the
Associated Press provide news and features for newspapers, broadcast stations and groups that cannot have their
own correspondents at the scene of every news event. To accomplish this, AP and UPI have bureaus and correspondents scattered through the United States and the world.
UPI was the smaller by most any measurement.
For decades UP/UPI and the AP fought for supremacy.
On a corporate level, it was a battle to see which could contract with the most and/or biggest newspapers and broadcast stations.
Often, it was a personal duel between the UPI and the AP
correspondents covering the same event to see whose story
won the most “play,” that is, whose version appeared in the
most newspapers that subscribed to both news services.
UPI staffers, whose wages generally were lower and
who were often outnumbered, made up for it in enthusiasm
and esprit de corps. They were told to write “so it can be
understood by the Omaha Milkman” (Packard 1951, 7. He
changed the city to Kansas City for purposes of his book), a
phrase familiar to all Unipressers. The UPI alumni, known
as “downholders” because of management’s frequent orders
to “downhold” expenses, are spread throughout the journalism profession.
In the days before the dominance of television news, UPI
and the AP shaped the agenda of coverage for the rest of
the news media. UPI’s Louis Cassels, the most prominent
religion columnist of the day, remarked that two of the most
powerful persons in Washington at any one moment were
the two persons sitting in the “slot” at UPI and AP. This
was true, Cassels said, because the “slot” determined what
stories were going to move on the wire and when—and
because most high officials in Washington monitored the
wires carefully and acted accordingly.
At its peak in the 1970s, UPI had about 170 bureaus. In
the United States, the general practice was to put bureaus in
a state’s largest city and the capital city.
Other bureaus were scattered throughout the world.
At the turn of the millennium, UPI had declined to
the point that it had few bureaus abroad or in the United
States and the AP had a virtual monopoly as the American
news agency. AP’s competition abroad was by then mainly
the British news agency Reuters or Agence France Presse
(AFP).
The list of famous Unipressers was impressive. Overseas,
Westbrook Pegler, later a nationally syndicated columnist,
covered World War I. Webb Miller, a famed foreign correspondent, covered eleven wars during the period between
and including the two world wars (he hated war as is suggested by the title of his autobiography, I Found No Peace).
Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchor, was UP’s chief correspondent in Europe during World War II. Russell Jones
won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the 1956 Hungary
uprising. Henry Shapiro covered the Soviet Union during
most of the Cold War, along with Harrison Salisbury, who
went on to the New York Times. Joe Galloway, barely in his
twenties at the time, was the correspondent in Vietnam who
later wrote the best-selling We Were Soldiers Once … And
Young. Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times and
winner of three Pulitzer prizes got his start with UPI.
At home, UPI’s stable of famous bylines was vast. Allen
Drury, who wrote Advice and Consent (1959), covered the
U.S. Senate. David Brinkley later was an NBC anchor.
Merriman Smith, Helen Thomas, and Al Spivak were perhaps the most famous—and talented—team ever of White
House correspondents. Few sports writers could turn a
phrase as well as Oscar Fraley, who also wrote TV’s The
Untouchables.
These reporters were backed up by relatively unknown
editors and writers whose by-lines rarely appeared on a dispatch. Lucien Carr, a UPI news editor in New York and
Washington, was the “intellectual” in Jack Kerouac’s “beat”
generation coterie. UPI emphasized sharp, concise writing
—and among the best at this were David Smothers, the exQuiz Kid, in Chicago, Robert M. Andrews in London and
Washington, and Jack Warner in Atlanta.
One of the best leads ever to move on the UP/UPI wire
was written by Merriman Smith, then in his mid-twenties:
TUTTNALL, Ga. (UP) — Six Negro men in the death
house atop Georgia’s Tuttnall Prison started singing early
this morning but by lunchtime their song was ended.
“Oh you sinners, better get ready, God is comin’,” they
chorused loudly, hour after hour, until the electric chair
had claimed every one of them in the largest mass execution in state history (quoted by Robert J. Donovan in
his Foreword to Merriman Smith’s Book of Presidents: A
White House Memoir, ed. Tim Smith. New York: W.W.
Norton, 1972, 21).
Though probably not by design, UPI played a part in
the women’s and civil rights movements. Among the topflight UPI correspondents who dominated coverage in state
capitals were Hortense Meyers in Indiana, Barbara Frye
in Florida, Bessie Ford in Mississippi, Roberta Ulrich in
Salem. Charlotte Moulton was the dean of Supreme Court
reporters.
Other leading state house correspondents included Seymour Hersh (later one of the country’s top investigative
reporters in Pierre), Dick Charnock in Boise, John Herbers
(later with the New York Times), in Jackson, and Bill Cotterell in Atlanta.
UPI lagged far behind in putting African Americans on
its staff. Yet its influence on the civil rights movement may
have been significant. Often the local journalists in a city
had been there so long they had become part of the community’s social and power structure. UPI correspondents,
often young and with few more possessions than what they
could toss in the back seat of a car, were transferred frequently. This was true in the South in the 1960s.
So, a young UPI staffer would transfer to a city that was
experiencing racial unrest and civil rights demonstrations.
Sometimes the local media ignored those demonstrations.
The young UPI staffer, not knowing any better, would cover
the story in detail, thus forcing competitors to do the same.
The result was that for the first time, these demonstrations
began to get covered and the nation began to pay attention.
Its photographers excelled too. UPI (and AP) photographers never achieved the celebrity status their magazine
counterparts enjoyed only because, until the 1970s, their
names were not published with their work. But the photo credits in today’s coffee-table books reveal that most are by
UPI or AP photographers.
Stanley Tretick took the famous picture of young John
F. Kennedy Jr. peeking from under his father’s desk and
the poignant photo of John-John saluting as his father’s bier
passed. David Hume Kennerly, who became official White
House photographer for President Gerald R. Ford, won a
Pulitzer for his coverage of the Vietnam War. Tom Schaefer
while with Acme earlier snapped one of the photos of General Douglas Macarthur wading ashore in the Philippines
during World War II. Frank Cancellare took the picture of a
beaming President Harry S Truman carrying a copy of the
Chicago Tribune saying “Dewey Wins” the 1948 election.
The agency also established UPI Audio, a service for
client radio stations and UPITN, a newsfilm service for
television stations and networks. It had its own staff of correspondents, including such “golden throats” as Bill Reilly,
Pye Chamberlayne, Gene Gibbons, Denis Gulino, and Tom
Foty.
But by the end of the twentieth century, much of UPI’s
glory, its staff and bureaus, was gone. What had happened?
The forerunner of the modern AP was established in 1848
by a group of New York City area newspapers, which eventually sold news to other newspapers. From the beginning it
was a “co-operative,” as contrasted to UP, which was a private corporation. The first United Press had a meteoric rise
and fall in the 1890s. One of its clients was E.W. Scripps,
and when it tumbled, he organized the Scripps-McRae
Press Association which distributed news files from its own
correspondents as well as other newspapers. He bought the
competing Publishers’ Press Association and Laffan News
Agency.
In 1907, Scripps combined several of these services into
a single agency—United Press Associations. And Roy Howard, at twenty-four barely half Scripps’ age, became general
manager of the new agency. His assignment, as Morris put
it, was to “buck the Associated Press on a shoestring” with
a young staff that was “usually underpaid and grossly overworked” (Morris 1957, 23, 24, 42).
The International News Service was formed by William
Randolph Hearst in 1909. It always struggled in third place
in a three-way race, and in 1958, it merged with United
Press to form UPI.
For all of Howard’s considerable drive, he also perpetrated UP’s perhaps most infamous error. In Europe as
World War I was drawing to an end, Howard, acting on a
tip from an American intelligence officer with confirmation
from an American admiral, filed an urgent story saying the
Allies and Germany had signed an armistice. But it was
November 7, 1917—four days before the armistice actually
was signed.
UP’s Raymond Clapper, reporting on the 1920 Republican convention, wrote that Warren G. Harding had been
chosen as the GOP presidential nominee in a “smoke-filled
room,” a phrase that made it into the lexicon. About the
same time, another term emerged that survived for all
future Unipressers— “downhold.” It followed the wire service practice of using cables.
By 1919 UP was highly profitable with 745 newspaper
clients. During Karl Bickel’s presidency, from 1923 to
1935, the number of client newspapers increased from 867
to 1,300 in 49 countries, and the number of bureaus from
50 to 81 (Morris 1957, 197). In 1937 the American Newspaper Guild (CIO) organized the UP staff. By 1941, as World
War II started, UP served 462 papers in 38 other countries
(Harnett-Ferguson 2003, 64). It had become dominant in
South America.
UP President Hugh Baillie endorsed a plan in 1935 to
make UP the premiere news service for radio stations, and
soon a separate broadcast wire was established. This style
of writing emphasized short, simple words and sentences …
with lots of ellipses and pronunciations inserted … to make
for easy reading by the newscaster and easy listening. The
wire, known as UPR, became one of the company’s best
sources of revenue.
Unlike the dismal days at the end of the century, UP’s
leadership changed infrequently. Howard served until
1920; Karl Bickel from 1923 to 1935. The pugnacious Baillie (bayh-lee) led UP for twenty years, never forgetting he
was a correspondent and often seeming to spend more time
abroad chasing stories than running the news agency. Then
the urbane Frank H. Bartholomew served from 1955 to
1962.
Bickel—and UP—were directly involved in several big
stories involving Charles Lindbergh. An enterprising UP
correspondent arranged to keep a telephone open at the side
of the field as Lindbergh’s 1927 transatlantic flight neared
Paris, and within five minutes after The Spirit of St. Louis
landed, all UP clients knew it. At home, five years later,
Bickel fielded a telephone call in his apartment from Charles
Lindbergh that the famed flier’s son had been kidnapped…
and a few days later, another call that Lindbergh was ready
to pay a ransom. Later, when AP flashed the wrong verdict
in Hauptmann’s trial on the death of the Lindbergh child,
UP got it correct.
In 1935 when Huey Long was shot in Louisiana, UP
reporter I.I. Femrite at the hospital overhead a doctor say
“he’s dead.” Femrite quickly phoned a flash to the news
desk. At the state capital Femrite’s colleague, J. Alan
Coogan, in a diversionary ploy, strolled casually through
the press room, even bumming a match from the AP correspondent to light a cigarette. The AP reportedly asked, “Do
you think Huey’s going to die tonight?”
Bickel had persuaded Benito Mussolini, a journalist, to
write stories for United Features. Webb Miller, who had
been a journalist colleague of the man now known as Il
Duce, noted the Italian armed buildup in Ethiopia in 1935
and so prepared, Miller was ready with his flash: ITALIAN ADVANCE INTO ETHIOPIA STARTED AT FIVE
A.M. (Morris 1957, 207). Baillie called it “one of the great
beats of news-service history” (Baillie 1959, 93). Later, in a
one-on-one interview, Mussolini asked Baillie if UP was on
Italy’s side. “We are favorable to you to the extent that we
are not favorable to you. It balances,” Baillie replied (Baillie 1959, 96).
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, Frank Tremaine in Honolulu was awakened by the sound of the
antiaircraft guns. In moments he was making calls and then
his wife joined in phoning to the UP bureaus in San Francesco and Manila what they were seeing and hearing.
“United Press grew and gained prestige under Baillie,
but weakness in the ‘financials’ started in the 1950s…” and
Ferguson noted (2003, 104). By 1957, UP had 4,833 newspaper and broadcast clients and 4,000 employees worldwide.
In 1951, Argentine dictator Juan Peron closed La Prensa,
one of UP’s major clients in South America, costing UP
about a half million dollars a year in revenue. In 1958,
UP merged with the Hearst-owned, money-losing International News Service (INS) to form UPI—and the AP filed
the story first to score an embarrassing scoop. Most INS
employees and some UP personnel were laid off. Al Spivak
and Hortense Meyers were among the INS employees who
joined the new UPI.
The 1960s were days of tumult in the United States—the
civil rights demonstrations, the feminist movement, 1963
John F. Kennedy and 1968 Martin Luther King and Robert
Kennedy assassinations, the Vietnam war. Lucinda Franks
and Tom Powers combined to write a Pulitzer-winning story
on the background of Diana Oughton, a young woman from
a wealthy, small-town Illinois family who was killed in a
New York townhouse where bombs were made. Ironically,
it was one of those ordeals that have provided the single
incident most identified with UPI.
Merriman Smith was in the “pool” car as President
Kennedy rode from the airport into Dallas. (A “pool” is
the handful of reporters, always including the major news
services, assigned to accompany the president when the
entire White House press corps is unable to.) There was
a shot, then a pause, and two more shots. Smith, a gun
fancier, was probably the one who said, “Those were
shots!” Smith, sitting in the front seat, picked up the
phone in the car, called the Dallas bureau, and dictated:
“BULLETIN —THREE SHOTS WERE FIRED AT PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S MOTORCADE IN DOWNTOWN
DALLAS.” Smitty, as he was widely known, refused to
give up the phone despite the AP’s Jack Bell’s attempts to
wrestle it away so he could file too. Later, as Air Force One
carried the slain president and the new president, Lyndon B.
Johnson, back to Washington, Smith composed the story of
how the day had unfolded—and it won a Pulitzer Prize.
In the 1970s, UPI was on the cutting edge in the use of
computers, and this led to the eventual elimination of the
“operators,” who had been organized by the Commercial
Telegraphers Union and put the stories into tape to move on
the Teletype machines. This meant that a reporter now
could write a dispatch at a computer, file it, have it read out
by an editor also at a computer, which filed it directly to
the newspapers that in turn, could print it from direct from
the computer. Quite literally, the reporter on the scene had
typed the very print appearing in the newspaper.
What lay ahead were wholesale, non-stop changes for
next decades, in owners, management and editors, in wave
after wave of staff lay-offs, and in pay cuts. Perhaps worse,
the UPI began to lose its innovative edge. The financial
drain continued. By 1972 UPI was losing $2 million a year
and the loss was mounting. UPI pulled out of several states,
such as the two Dakotas, giving up an attempt to file a statewide news file. UPI was struck by the Wire Service Guild
for three weeks in 1974. UPI froze wages in 1979. UPI
President Rod Beaton failed in an attempt to sell limited
partnerships in UPI to other newspaper publishers.
Scripps-Howard made known in 1979 that it no longer
could keep subsidizing UPI. It became common knowledge
that UPI was up for sale. Reuters and the new cable network, CNN, logical buyers, took a look the UPI books and
decided against buying. It was even suggested that UPI be
given to National Public Radio. Media giant Rupert Murdoch and years later evangelist-broadcaster Pat Robertson
expressed an interest.
Finally, in 1982, Scripps sold UPI debt-free to two thirtyish entrepreneurs, Doug Ruhe and Bill Geissler, for $1 and
secretly gave them $5 million to keep it afloat. Within hours
UPI was back in debt. They hired expensive consultants and
entertained “grand dreams” (Gordon and Cohen 1990, 147),
but the drain continued. The next year the New York Times
cancelled its contract although it later extended until 1986.
The next few years were chaotic. Wave after wave of clientele shrinkage, staff layoffs, and cuts in pay swept the
company. Morale suffered. The personnel exodus continued at every level. In a seven-year period, there were seven
UPI presidents.
Ruhe and Geissler began selling off parts of UPI: its
remaining stake in UPITN, the electronic data base, photo
library, which contained priceless pictures, the foreign
photo staff and overseas picture contracts. UPI faced bankruptcy, and obtained Chapter 11 protection in 1985. (Chapter 11 allows a company to keep operating while keeping
the creditors at bay and preventing them from closing it
down.) The two owners feuded with Chairman and Chief
Executive Officer Luis Nogales.
Although Beaton and Editor-in-Chief H.L. Stevenson
departed or were replaced, Unipressers continued putting
out a comprehensive news report, continuing to match and
often to beat the AP. Under the direction of Managing Editor Ronald E. Cohen and Chief Investigative Reporter Greg
Gordon, UPI ran detailed, candid dispatches each day about
the company’s mounting problems, for which they eventually paid with their jobs. UPI was the first news service to
call the close 1976 election for Jimmy Carter over President
Gerald R. Ford.
The next buyer, in 1985, after a bankruptcy court battle,
was Mario Vazquez-Rana, who owned a large group of
newspapers in Mexico. In weeks, the top three UPI editors
were gone. The rest of the staff was shaved as well, including the charismatic Nogales.
In 1987 Vazquez-Rana turned over control of UPI to Dr.
Earl Brian, who had been a member of Ronald Reagan’s
California Cabinet. There were more layoffs and pay cuts
and closing of bureaus. Worldwide News Inc., with connections to the Saudi royal family, bought the agency in 1992.
Finally, its client base almost depleted and only a shell
of a staff remaining, it was sold in 2000 to the News World Communications, established by the Rev. Sun Myung
Moon, founder of the Unification Church, and owner of the
arch-conservative Washington Times. UPI’s icon, Helen
Thomas, quit in protest.
What had led to the comatose state of UPI? The AP was
a co-operative that did not need to show a profit. The AP
thus could sell its service for less. UPI was a private organization that was increasingly subsidized by the increasingly
disenchanted, proliferating Scripps-Howard Trust family.
So, the Scripps family finally stopped subsidizing UPI.
Stephen Vincent Benet, in a study of UP in Fortune in
May 1933, had stated: “…every UP executive has come
from the ranks” (Harnett-Ferguson 2003, 123). (This was
not true, of course, during recent years when many if not
most of the top echelon had no previous wire-service experience.) In the outlying bureaus, often outstanding correspondents were “promoted” to regional executives, the fancy UP
term for salesman. But the traits that made a person a good
correspondent were not the traits that would create a successful salesman. Many of these regional executives quit,
and UPI had lost both good reporters and salesmen.
Afternoon newspapers had become a dinosaur because
of ever-earlier deadlines and the required distribution of the
evening papers through rush hour traffic. Thus, UPI suffered a shrinking newspaper market.
As one Unipresser put it: “Both Beaton and Charles
Scripps, however, ignored entreaties from Bernard Townsend,
a Scripps financial vice president, to explore the growing
world market for business and financial information.”
Television eroded newspapers as the primary source of
news for the general public. Newspapers and newspaper
groups started their own syndicates that distributed their
own stories. Many newspapers felt that it made more sense
to take one basic service—generally preferring the AP—
and a supplemental service, rather than both AP and UPI.
By 2005, the combined New York headquarters and
once powerful Washington bureau had shrunk to sixteen
persons, who “were genuinely concerned not only about
their livelihoods, but also about the longevity of an organization that they had taken a great amount of pride being
involved with” (Preciphs 2005, 41).
Further Reading
Baillie, Hugh. High Tension. New York: Harper & Brothers,
1959.
Gordon, Gregory, and Ronald E. Cohen. Down to the Wire: UPI’s
Fight for Survival. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990.
Harnett, Richard M., and Billy G. Ferguson. Unipress: Covering
the 20th Century. Golden: Fulcrum, 2003.
Herbers, John. “The Reporter in the Deep South.” Nieman
Reports, double issue, Winter 1999 and Spring 2000.
Miller, Webb. I Found No Peace. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1936.
Moore, Harold G., and Joseph. Galloway. We Were Soldiers Once
… And Young: Ia Dang—The Battle That Changed the War
in Vietnam. New York: Random House, 1992.
Morris, Joe Alex. Deadline Every Minute. New York: Doubleday
& Co., 1957.
Packard, Reynolds. Lowdown (originally published under the title
The Kansas City Milkman). New York: Bantam, 1951.
Preciphs, Joi L. “Participant Observation of Editorial Functions
and Workplace Culture at United Press International.”
Unpublished master’s research paper, University of Missouri
School of Journalism, 2005.
Wes Pippert