UPI RIP
Whenever I remember my two years at United Press International I think of this dubious project. Still, they were good years. I was so young and ignorant that I could be paid virtually nothing and think it a fortune. And if UPI journalism wasn’t deep it was wide. Somewhere in almost every major city on earth a door opened onto a bureau full of chattering UPI teletypes, a door I was entitled to open.
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That manuscript was about 500 pages long. Ferguson cut it by a third, and Unipress: United Press International Covering the 20th Century has just come off the presses of Fulcrum Publishing in Golden, Colorado. (The house was touted to Ferguson by somebody on Downhold, and one way to buy the book is through its Web site, fulcrum-books.com.)
The book’s story begins in 1907, when publisher E.W. Scripps founded United Press to compete with the Associated Press, which served only the papers that owned it. The other was Hearst’s International News Service, launched in 1909. The two wires merged in 1958 to become United Press International. The book ends 40 years later. “In ’99, the CEO of UPI at the time, Arnaud de Borchgrave, announced that the world no longer needed two redundant wire services,” Ferguson explains. “Instead UPI would service markets on the Internet.”
In 1998 the Saudis hired Arnaud de Borchgrave, the former editor of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times, as its CEO. De Borchgrave was an experienced foreign correspondent, but Unipress points out that his exclusive interview with Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic went almost unnoticed because by this point UPI had lost virtually all its newspaper clients. It had held on to some 400 radio clients, but in 1999 UPI sold these contracts to the AP. “It is time to move on,” said de Borchgrave, explaining that UPI would from that day forth exist only on the Internet.
He isn’t sure what they’re paid to do, since it isn’t clear to him what today’s UPI is. “Nobody can figure out where the hell it’s going,” he says. “Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s exclusive of the people at UPI. I don’t think UPI’s current management has drawn any kind of a battle plan that people understand.”
This was the new conventional wisdom, superseding the old CW that Edgar could cakewalk to Washington. As Steve Neal wrote April 18 in the Sun-Times, “The Republican nomination is his for the asking and he would have a decisive edge over any prospective Democratic rival.”
