Your fiercest rival owns your company

Welcome to Legacy Beyond Profits, where we explore what it really means to build a business that leaves a mark for the right reasons.

Chicago, 1941. Marshall Field III has just spent $4 million launching the Chicago Sun—equivalent to $85 million today. He believes Chicago needs an alternative to the Tribune's isolationist stance as war looms in Europe.

Field can hire the best reporters and afford the finest presses. But without access to the Associated Press, the Sun cannot survive. Readers will not pay for a newspaper that only covers local news.

Field applies for AP membership. Robert McCormick, owner of the rival Tribune, has a vote under the cooperative's bylaws. He votes no.

Field's $4 million investment faces collapse.

Four years later, the Supreme Court rules 6-2 against the Associated Press. Justice Felix Frankfurter: "Truth and understanding are not wares like peanuts or potatoes."

From that moment forward, any publisher can join. No member can block a competitor.

Fierce rivals must now share the same news source. That structural impossibility creates something market forces alone cannot: a brake on partisanship that endures when intentions fail.

From competitive advantage to collective infrastructure

Founded in 1846 to share telegraph costs for Mexican-American War coverage, the Associated Press became journalism's shared infrastructure. The insight: when competitors jointly own your organization, serving one faction becomes structurally expensive.

1. Give competitors veto power over bias

When the Tribune and the Sun both own AP, neither can push partisan coverage without the other threatening exit. This isn't neutrality from noble intention but from member economics. If AP tilts left, conservative publishers reduce usage or leave. If it leans right, liberal outlets do the same. Every member has financial incentive to keep AP usable across the political spectrum. Veto power distributed among competitors creates structural brake on capture.

2. Profit comes from reliability, not engagement

The AP Stylebook didn't become journalism's standard by accident. When 1,300 members use your content, stylistic consistency and factual reporting become operational requirements, not cultural aspirations. Members need content they can trust and use regardless of their editorial stance. Sensationalism might drive clicks for individual outlets, but cooperative members demand boring reliability. "Just the facts" becomes the only profitable strategy.

3. Remove quarterly pressure, remove profit motive

Not-for-profit status means no shareholders demanding growth, no quarterly earnings calls, no stock price to optimize. Reuters, by contrast, is owned by Thomson Reuters, a publicly traded corporation. That creates different incentives. When AP faced financial pressure in 2008 with members threatening cancellation over fee increases, there was no private equity firm forcing asset sales, no parent company prioritizing other divisions. Members negotiated. Fees adjusted. The cooperative survived.

4. Legal mandates create structural openness

The 1945 Supreme Court ruling didn't just admit the Chicago Sun. It eliminated members' power to block competitors permanently. Any qualified publisher can join. This transforms AP from private club to public utility that happens to be privately owned. Open access prevents the cooperative from serving only ideologically aligned members. Exclusion becomes legally impossible.

How competitors sharing ownership created journalism's structural brake

Five newspapers, 1846. Telegraph costs for war coverage were crushing individual budgets. Moses Yale Beach proposed pooling resources. The cooperative worked. By 1900, AP had reorganized with clear rules: members contributed local news, received national coverage in return.

Success created a problem. As AP became dominant, membership became valuable. Publishers controlling AP access controlled competitive advantage. Why let rivals access the same wire service?

By the 1930s, AP bylaws explicitly allowed members to veto competitor applications.

When Marshall Field launched the Chicago Sun in 1941 to compete with the Tribune, he applied for AP membership. The Tribune's Robert McCormick voted no. Field was denied.

Field took it to the Justice Department. The government sued, arguing AP's exclusionary bylaws violated antitrust law. The case reached the Supreme Court in December 1944.

Justice Hugo Black's 6-2 ruling: the bylaws constituted restraint of trade. Even cooperatives operating in interstate commerce cannot use membership rules to restrict competition. Any qualified publisher could join. Members lost veto power permanently.

The ruling forced a choice: dissolve the cooperative or accept that fierce competitors would share the same news infrastructure. AP chose the latter.

For the next 70 years, rivals jointly owned the organization supplying them all. The New York Times and New York Post. Liberal and conservative publishers. CNN and Fox affiliates. All using the same wire service, all with equal ownership stake.

That shared ownership created structural impossibility of sustained partisan bias. Tilt too far in any direction, lose members on the opposite side. The cooperative doesn't maximize engagement. It maximizes member satisfaction across the spectrum.

This mattered little when most news outlets aimed for broad audiences. But then came 2016.

Cable news chose partisan positioning. Digital platforms optimized for engagement over accuracy. Social media rewarded emotional resonance. Media polarization accelerated dramatically.

AP faced the test: does cooperative structure prevent partisanship when the entire industry is abandoning neutrality?

Criticism emerged. Bias rating organizations shifted AP from "Center" to "Lean Left." Critics pointed to story selection, headline framing, alleged imbalance in fact-checking. Some accused left-leaning editorializing. AllSides surveys showed audiences across the spectrum perceiving AP as slightly left of center.

But here's what didn't happen: AP didn't become MSNBC or Fox News. While competitors went fully partisan to serve specific audiences and maximize engagement, AP remained near center. Not perfectly neutral. Not universally trusted. But usable by members across the political spectrum.

The ratings tell the story. Media Bias/Fact Check: "Left-Center" but "High" factual reporting. Ad Fontes: "Neutral/Balanced" and "Most Reliable." AllSides: "Lean Left" but not extremist. The pattern: modest perceived bias, high factual accuracy, broad usability.

Compare the trajectory of organizations with different structures. Reuters became a for-profit division of Thomson Reuters, subject to quarterly earnings pressure. Many regional wire services disappeared. United Press International declined and sold multiple times.

AP survived because cooperative structure insulated it from profit demands. When newspaper revenue declined in the 2000s and members threatened cancellation over fee increases, there were no shareholders forcing growth, no private equity demanding asset sales. Members negotiated. Fees adjusted. The cooperative adapted.

Today: 235 bureaus in 94 countries. Content in English, Spanish, Arabic. More than 1,300 newspapers and thousands of broadcasters use AP. Approximately 128 million monthly website visits. Since 1917, 59 Pulitzer Prizes including 36 for photography.

Revenue from licensing and member fees. Not-for-profit status maintained. No shareholders. Board elected by members. CEO Daisy Veerasingham manages under board oversight.

CEO Gary Pruitt: "No one owns AP. We are truly independent, neither part of a corporation nor funded by any government."

Analyst Ken Doctor: "The AP's cooperative structure insulates it from quarterly profit pressures that public companies face. Its mandate is to serve its members and the public interest, not Wall Street."

From strategy to legacy

The Associated Press didn't eliminate bias. It made sustained partisanship structurally expensive.

When competitors share ownership, serving one faction costs you the other. Fox News and MSNBC chose specific audiences and maximized engagement. AP couldn't make that choice. The cooperative structure made full partisan capture too costly.

Truth and understanding are not wares like peanuts or potatoes. They're shared infrastructure. The legacy that endures comes not from perfect neutrality but from structural design that makes capture difficult. When fierce competitors jointly own your organization, the only profitable strategy is serving all of them.