Associated Press

The Associated Press (AP) is an American not-for-profit news agency and cooperative headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it produces a continuous wire service of text, photo, video, audio, and data journalism distributed to member newspapers and broadcasters and to commercial subscribers worldwide^[2][4].

For the alternative data industry, the AP matters in two ways: its newswire is a foundational text source that sentiment vendors and machine-readable news platforms license and analyze, and the organization directly sells structured datasets — most prominently its authoritative U.S. election results data — through Data Solutions offerings aimed at media, government, education, and finance^[1].

What It Does

The AP describes its output as roughly 5,000 pieces of individual journalism per day, about 80 percent of it visual content, adding around 1.34 million photos per year to an archive of more than 2 million video clips^[1]. Its formats span video, live video, photos, graphics, text services, audio, and data^[1].

Data Products

Beyond editorial content, the AP licenses structured data including U.S. election results, which it has collected and published since 1848 and which remain a de facto standard cited by media organizations before declaring winners^[1][2]. In May 2026 the AP announced it would provide its U.S. election results to OpenAI, describing its vote count as the standard for national, state, and local races^[3]. The organization also offers Rapid Data services for finance customers, a Media API, and AP VoteCast, its survey system developed with NORC at the University of Chicago to replace legacy exit polls^[1][2].

Buyers and Use Cases

Customers include news and media organizations, brands and agencies, governments, universities, and AI, tech, and data companies^[1]. In quantitative finance, AP newswire content flows into event-driven and sentiment models through licensed text feeds, while election and polling datasets are used by strategists and media analytics teams^[1].

History

The AP was formed in May 1846 by five New York newspapers to share the cost of transmitting news of the Mexican-American War, and it reorganized in Illinois in 1892 before moving to New York^[2]. It has earned 60 Pulitzer Prizes since the award was established in 1917^[2]. The cooperative operates bureaus globally and publishes in English, Spanish, and Arabic^[2].

Landscape

Alongside Reuters and Agence France-Presse, the AP is one of the major global newswires whose feeds underpin commercial news analytics. Sentiment providers typically process AP and other premium publisher content under license rather than crawling it, making the wire both a competitor to and supplier of alternative data platforms^[1][2].