A shared bill for war news.

The Associated Press began as a way for newspapers to share costs. In May 1846, Wikipedia says, five daily newspapers in New York City formed it to split the expense of transmitting news of the Mexican–American War. The venture was organised by Moses Yale Beach, publisher of The Sun, with the New York Herald, the Courier and Enquirer, the Journal of Commerce and the Evening Express. The New York Times became a member in September 1851.

The early name was the New York Associated Press, and for decades it shared the field with a rival group, the Western Associated Press, formed in 1862. After an 1892 investigation found that senior figures in the New York group had a secret arrangement with a competitor, the New York organisation was dissolved; that December the Western group was incorporated in Illinois under the name Associated Press, Wikipedia says. A 1900 ruling by the Illinois Supreme Court prompted the move of the organisation from Chicago back to New York.

That history explains the shape of the brand. The AP is a cooperative and an unincorporated association, run on a not-for-profit basis, whose member newspapers and broadcasters share their reports with it and receive its news in return, according to Wikipedia. Its identity has always been an identity for a service rather than a single title: the two letters AP appear as a credit line on other organisations’ pages and broadcasts, which makes the short form more visible than the full name.

The cooperative moved with the technology of its time. It adopted the teletype for its New York service in 1914 and launched its Wirephoto network for sending photographs over leased telephone lines in 1935; it began supplying news to radio stations in 1941. Its headquarters were at 50 Rockefeller Plaza from 1938 to 2004, then on West 33rd Street, and since 2017 at 200 Liberty Street in Lower Manhattan.

The stencil AP and the red bar.

The AP logo is a stencil: the letters A and P drawn with gaps, or bridges, as if cut from a template. On 23 February 2012 the agency announced a new logo, replacing one used for thirty years, Poynter reported that day. The earlier version had been designed internally three decades before; it was the mark that had sat on the cover of the AP Stylebook for those years.

The 2012 redesign kept the stencil and changed nearly everything around it. According to Poynter, the letters became black; the A no longer leaned against the P; both letters sat on the same baseline; and the bridges in the stencil were made more pronounced. A red bar under the letters recalled the earlier colour scheme. The new mark was produced by the New York design firm Objective Subject. Poynter also noted that, although the new logo carried the date 2011, it was introduced in 2012.

InPublishing reported the same launch on 24 February 2012, describing a black AP logotype with a bold red line beneath it, set inside a white holding box. It described the identity system as the AP’s main change of look in thirty years; it followed a master-brand strategy adopted in 2010 that put all of the AP’s business units, products and services under a single logo. The system also widened the range of colours and designs available for AP products. The rollout was staged, starting with the AP Mobile news app and the opening phase of a new AP.org website in March 2012, with video, archive and image sites to follow.

The package also came with guidance on colour, typography and placing the logo with images, Poynter wrote, and included a possible cover treatment for that year’s edition of the Stylebook.

News agencies and their marks.

A news brand is read before it is understood. The nameplate of a newspaper — the title set across the top of the front page — and the masthead of a magazine do the work a logo does elsewhere, but they sit above a page that changes every day or every issue, so they have to stay recognisable at any size and beside any headline. Many newspaper nameplates keep an engraved or blackletter look that recalls the age of metal type, while magazine mastheads tend to move more freely between redesigns.

Behind the nameplate sits the house typeface: the headline and text families that give every story the same voice. Some publishers commission their own type; others license and adapt existing families. On screens the identity shrinks again, into the app icon and favicon, where a single initial or monogram often has to carry the whole name. Reading these brands means looking at all three layers together — nameplate, type and icon — and noticing which details survive each change of format.

A stylebook with the agency’s name on it.

Outside newsrooms, the AP name is carried by a book. The Associated Press Stylebook is a guide to American English usage, punctuation and reporting practice written by journalists working for or connected with the cooperative. Wikipedia dates the earliest publicly available edition to 1953 and the modern edition to August 1977; since then it has appeared in paperback, spiral-bound, e-book and online editions, and the AP also posts usage advice on social media.

The Stylebook matters to the brand because it puts the AP mark in front of readers who never see a wire report. For thirty years the internally designed stencil logo sat on its cover, and the 2012 identity package included a proposed cover treatment for the new edition, Poynter reported. The cooperative’s name thus appears on pages written by other people, through its credit line, and on a reference book used by writers well beyond journalism.

Ownership is simple to state. The AP has no outside owner: it has been a cooperative of its member news organisations since its nineteenth-century beginnings, with its headquarters in New York City, according to Wikipedia. In March 2024 the newspaper publisher Gannett announced that it would stop using AP content, Wikipedia records, while continuing to use the AP’s election results data; the chain McClatchy also said it would stop using some AP services.

The visual identity is built for small sizes and many hosts: two letters, a stencil cut, black for the letters and a single red bar. The 2012 redesign sharpened the features that already worked at small sizes rather than replacing them, keeping the stencil that readers had seen on the Stylebook and in credit lines for three decades.

For a design guide, the Associated Press shows how a two-letter credit line can carry a whole identity. Compare Reuters, the London agency with its teleprinter dots, and The New York Times, an early AP member. For this guide we use black, a wire red and newsprint with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Associated Press’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.