United Press International

Origins

Though founded under its present name in 1958, UPI traces its roots to United Press Associations (UP). Publisher E. W. Scripps, in order to battle AP's then-restrictive membership policies, had formed three regional Scripps news services in the early 1900s, and merged them to become the UP on June 21, 1907. He argued there should be no restrictions on which papers (369 of them at first) could buy his developing news service. He hired Roy Howard to lead the wire service and it is Howard who is largely credited for the spirit of innovativeness and doggedness at UP, pioneering the use of bylines on wire service reports and offering feature stories long before they appeared on the AP. In its early years, as the number of subscribers doubled, the UP scrounged and scraped to cover the Mexican revolution and the growing labor movement, and then it scored big with coverage of the tragic 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City.

“Thud-dead! Thud-dead! Thud-dead!” began UP correspondent Bill Shepherd's account of the gruesome fire that killed 146 people, many of whom jumped from high windows to avoid the flames. “I learned a new sound,” he wrote, “a more horrible sound than description can picture. It was the thud of a speeding, living body on a stone sidewalk” (Gordon and Cohen 1990, 7). Such writing became a hallmark of UP's approach, and it was well received by newspapers and readers alike. It also became part of the correspondent lore of wire service competitiveness that veteran AP and UPI staffers shared with younger cohorts.

Among these stories of UP's early years was its handling of the Armistice ending World War I. Receiving word from a bogus informant, the U.S. Embassy in Paris passed word to UP that an armistice had been signed. On November 7, 1918, UP ran the bulletin pronouncing the war's end and tens of thousands of Americans poured into the streets to celebrate. For hours, the AP stubbornly held out for official word and was subjected to angry demonstrations and cries of being pro-German. When the AP was able to confirm that the Germans had not yet signed the agreement, UP was forced to issue a correction, and the AP was redeemed. Three days later, the war did officially end. The UP restored some of its reputation when roles were reversed in 1927 and the AP prematurely reported that Charles [Page 1412]Lindbergh had landed safely after the first solo transatlantic flight from New York to Paris.

Competing after the war with “The Ring” news agency cartel operated by Reuters, Havas, Wolff, and the AP, UP became the first American news service to provide service to subscriber newspapers in Europe, South America, and the Far East. Indeed, its success was such that Reuters invited it to join the ring in 1912. UP turned down the offer and continued to expand. Direct service to Europe came in 1921, China a year later, and, through a subsidiary, colonies of the British Empire by 1922. By 1929, UP was serving nearly 1,200 newspapers in 45 countries. Despite the Depression, that number grew to 1,715 newspapers and radio stations (UP was the first news agency to serve them, starting in 1935) by 1939.

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