75th Anniversary Report -- The Early Years
What it lacked in size, the fledgling news service made up in brashness and boldness.
Facing a large, firmly entrenched cooperative, the upstart UP had a handful of correspondents and part-timers who aggressively pursued the big stories each day. When they were done, they swept the floors, kept the books, and sold the news service to newspapers.
Incorporated as United Press Association on June 21, 1907, UP was the inspiration of gruff, eccentric E.W. Scripps, a Midwesterner who struck out on his own after he and a brother founded The Detroit News.
Scripps envisioned a string of dailies selling for a penny and his first was The Cleveland Press. He had plans for other cities but soon found he was unable to purchase news from The Associated Press, whose rules permitted a publisher to veto AP membership to any news rival in his city
------ PHOTO: The July 15, 1907 edition of The Cleveland Press told of the creation of United Press in a big-headlined front page story.
PHOTO: W.S. Forrrest, manager of UP's Paris bureau, stands in 1918 by the car that took him to cover World War I battles. He wore a tin cap and carried a gas mask in his shoulder bag. ------
Scripps owned the Scripps-McRae Press Association in the Middle West and the Scripps News Association on the Pacific Coast in the early 1900s. In 1906, he acquired control of the Publishers Press Association in the East and merged the three the following year to form United Press Associations.
Afternoon newspapers made up the bulk of the UP's clientele. Within two years the service was going to a few European newspapers and to the Japanese Telegraph News Agency for distribution in that country. UP already was looking beyond the United States boundaries.
Government controlled or financed news agencies had formed a cartel in much of the world, exchanging news and enjoying franchises.
When Reuters, the British agency, hinted in 1912 at ending its ties with AP and working on a new affiliation with UP, many felt that it was acknowledgment of the new UP's inroads in five short years.
------ PHOTO: Historic photo of the Wright Brothers' plane in flight, one of 14 million pictures in UPI's library. This shot was distributed by the Newspaper Enterprise Association, which formed the forerunner of UPI Newspictures. ------
Roy W. Howard, the brash and energetic young man chosen while in his 20s by Scripps to head UP, was skeptical of a Reuters alliance.
"I want to see the United Press develop as a worldwide news agency," he said. The Reuters talks were broken off, and UP cast the die to cover the world with its own reporters.
"We've got to do things that have never been done before," Howard told his troops; and they did.
Bylines appeared on major stories. Newsfeatures began moving on the UP wires, which were snaking their way westward to California. Interviews with world leaders were regular features. UP challenged the cartel in South America, with prestigious La Prensa of Buenos Aires among the first to sign up.
------ PHOTO: UP's newsroom just after moving to new offices at 220 East 42nd Street, New York, in 1931. ------
Howard believed that UPI stories should be distinct from the somber reporting style of the day. UP reporters were encouraged to weave color and the human element into their dispatches. Detailed accounts of the suffering and violence during a textile strike in Lawrence, Mass., was widely credited with inspiring a congressional investigation into working conditions in textile mills.
World War I -- with UP's client list approaching 600 -- saw the service go head to head with AP and the European cartel reports of agencies such as Reuters, Havas and Wolf.
United Press stories described the "first battle of the air" involving a zeppelin, and correspondents dashed to the front line in touring cars.
Newspapers bannered Howard's interview with David Lloyd George, Britain's secretary of war, on Sept. 28, 1916. George's promise, "Britain has only begun to fight," was at once a break from traditional diplomatic niceties and journalistic restraint in reporting them.
The war helped shatter the cartels forever, and UP emerged as a strong and viable service. AP scored it share of beats, but UP's aggressive and colorful coverage made an impact on editors. More than 100 American newspapers signed up to receive the service in the first year of the war alone.
------ PHOTO: "A news story that correctly reports a situation must inevitably reflect and reproduce the color and atmosphere natural to the situation. The real danger is not in honestly colored news but in dishonestly bleached news." -- Roy W. Howard ------