AP The Associated Press is an American news agency.

The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists. Many newspapers and broadcasters outside the United States are AP subscribers, paying a fee to use AP material without being contributing members of the cooperative. As of 2005, the news collected by the AP is published and republished by more than 1,700 newspapers, in addition to more than 5,001 television and radio broadcasters. The photographlibrary of the AP consists of over 10 million images. The Associated Press operates 243 news bureaus, and it serves at least 120 countries, with an international staff located all over the world. Associated Press also operates The Associated Press Radio Network, which provides newscasts twice hourly for broadcast and satellite radio and television stations. The AP Radio also offers news and public affairs features, feeds of news sound bites, and long form coverage of major events. As part of their cooperative agreement with The Associated Press, most member news organizations grant automatic permission for the AP to distribute their local news reports. For example, on page two of every edition of The Washington Post, the newspaper's mastheadincludes the statement, "The Associated Press is entitled exclusively to use for re-publication of all news dispatches credited to it or not otherwise credited in this paper and all local news of spontaneous origin published herein." The AP employs the "inverted pyramid formula" for writing that enables the news outlets to edit a story to fit its available publication area without losing the story's essential meaning and news information. Cutbacks at longtime U.S. rival United Press International, most significantly in 1993, left the AP as the primary nationally oriented news service based in the United States, although United Press International still produces and distributes news stories daily. Other English-language news services, such as Reuters and the English-language service of Agence France-Presse, are based outside the United States. More recently launched internet news services, such as All Headline News(AHN) are becoming competitive to the traditional wire services like the AP.

HISTORY
Associated Press is a not-for-profit news cooperative formed in the spring of 1846 by five daily newspapers in New York City to share the cost of transmitting news of the Mexican-American Warby boat, horse express, and telegraph. The venture was organized by Moses Yale Beach (180068), second publisher of the New York Sun, and agreed to by the Herald, Courier and Enquirer, Journal of Commerce, and the Express. Some historians believe that the Tribune joined at this time; documents show it was a member in 1849. The New York Times became a member in 1851. Initially known as the New York Associated Press (NYAP), the organization faced competition from the Western Associated Press (1862), which criticized it for monopolistic practices in gathering news and setting prices. An investigation completed in 1892 by Victor Lawson, editor and publisher of the Chicago Daily News, revealed that several principals of the NYAP had entered

into a secret agreement with United Press, a rival organization, to share NYAP news and the profits of reselling it. The revelations led to the demise of the NYAP and in December 1892, the Western Associated Press was incorporated in Illinois as the Associated Press. An Illinois Supreme Court decision (Inter Ocean Publishing Co. v. Associated Press) in 1900that the AP was a public utility and operating in restraint of traderesulted in AP's move from Chicago to New York City, where corporation laws were more favorable to cooperatives.[citation needed] Melville Stone, who had founded the Chicago Daily News in 1875, served as AP General Manager from 1893 to 1921. He embraced the standards of accuracy, impartiality, and integrity for which AP is still known. The cooperative grew rapidly under the leadership of Kent Cooper (served 1925-48), who built up bureau staff in South America, Europe, and (after World War II), the Middle East. He introduced the telegraph typewriter or teletypewriter into newsrooms in 1914. In 1935, AP launched the Wirephoto network, which allowed transmission of news photographs over leased private telephone lines on the day they were taken. This gave AP a major advantage over other news media outlets. While the first network was only between New York, Chicago and San Francisco, eventually AP had its network across the whole United States.[3] In 1945, the Supreme Court of the United States held in Associated Press v. United States that AP had been violating the Sherman Antitrust Act by prohibiting member newspapers from selling or providing news to nonmember organizations as well as making it very difficult for nonmember newspapers to join the AP. In 1982, satellites began transmitting news photography. AP entered the broadcast field in 1941 when it began distributing news to radio stations; it created its own radio network in 1974. In 1994, it established APTV, a global video newsgathering agency. APTV merged with WorldWide Television News in 1998 to form APTN, which provides video to international broadcasters and websites. In 2009, AP had more than 240 bureaus globally. Its mission to gather with economy and efficiency an accurate and impartial report of the newshas not changed since its founding, but digital technology has made the distribution of the AP news report an interactive endeavor between AP and its 1,400 U.S. newspaper members as well as broadcasters, international subscribers, and online customers. AP headquarters are at 450 W. 33rd Street in Manhattan. The Associated Press began diversifying its news gathering capabilities, and by 2007 AP was generating only about 30% of its revenue from United States newspapers. 37% came from the global broadcast customers, 15% from online ventures, and 18% came from international newspapers and from photography.

Agence France-Presse
Agence France-Presse (AFP) is a French news agency, the oldest one in the world,[1] and one of the three largest with Associated Press and Reuters.[citation needed] It is also the largest French news agency. Currently, its CEO is Emmanuel Hoog and its news director Philippe Massonnet. AFP is headquartered in Paris, with regional offices in Hong Kong, Nicosia,Montevideo, So Paulo, and Washington, D.C., and bureaux in 110 countries. It transmits news in French, English, Arabic, Spanish, German, and Portuguese. HISTORY The agency was founded in 1835 by a Parisian translator and advertising agent, Charles-Louis Havas as Agence Havas. Two of his employees, Paul Reuter and Bernhard Wolff, later set up rival

news agencies in London and Berlin respectively. In order to reduce overheads and develop the lucrative advertising side of the business, Havass sons, who had succeeded him in 1852, signed agreements with Reuter and Wolff, giving each news agency an exclusive reporting zone in different parts of Europe. This arrangement lasted until the 1930s, when the invention of short-wave wireless improved and cut communications costs. To help Havas extend the scope of its reporting at a time of great international tension, the French government financed up to 47% of its investments. In 1940, when German forces occupied France during the Second World War, the news agency was taken over by the authorities and renamed "Office Franais d'Information" (French Information Office); only the private advertising company retained the name Havas.[2] On August 20, 1944, asAllied forces moved on Paris, a group of journalists in the French Resistance seized the offices of the FIO and issued the first news dispatch from the liberated city under the name of Agence France-Presse. Established as a state enterprise, AFP devoted the post-war years to developing its network of international correspondents. One of them was the first Western journalist to report the death of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin on March 6, 1953. AFP was keen to shake off its semi-official status, and on January 10, 1957 the French Parliament passed a law establishing its independence. Since that date, the proportion of the agencys revenues generated by subscriptions from government departments has steadily declined. Such subscriptions represented 115 million Euros in 2011.[3] In 1982, the agency began to decentralize its editorial decision-making by setting up the first of its five autonomous regional centres, in Hong Kong, then a British Crown colony. Each region has its own budget, administrative director and chief editor. In September 2007, the AFP Foundation was launched to promote higher standards of journalism worldwide. The mission of the AFP "... is' 'defined by its statutes: to report events, free of all influences or considerations likely to impair the exactitude of its news and under no circumstances to pass under the legal or actual control of an ideological, political or economic group."[4] In 1991, AFP set up a joint venture with Extel to create a financial news service, AFX News.[5] It was sold in 2006 to Thomson Financial.[6] The Mitrokhin archive identified six agents and two confidential KGB contacts inside Agence France-Presse who were used in Soviet operations in France.[7] In October 2008, the Government of France announced moves to change AFP's status, notably by bringing in outside investors. On November 27 of that year, the main trade unions represented in the company's home base of France - the CGT, Force Ouvrire, SNJ,[8] Union syndicale des journalistes CFDT[9] and SUD, launched an online petition to oppose what they saw as an attempt to privatise the agency. On December 10, 2009, the French Culture Minister Frdric Mitterrand announced that he was setting up a Committee of Experts under former AFP CEO Henri Pigeat to study plans for the agency's future status.[10] On February 24, 2010, Pierre Louette unexpectedly announced his intention to resign as CEO by the end of March, and move to a job with France Tlcom.

Reuters

Reuters ( /rtrz/) is a news agency headquartered in New York City, United States. Until 2008 the Reuters news agency formed part of a British independent company, Reuters Group plc, which was also a provider of financial market data. Since the merger between Reuters Group and the Thomson Corporation the Reuters news agency has been a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters, forming part of its Markets Division. HISTORY Paul Julius Reuter was born in 1816 in Kassel, Germany. With the electric telegraph, news no longer required days or weeks to travel long distances. In the 1850s, the 34-year-old Reuter was based in Aachen then in the Kingdom of Prussia, now in Germany close to the borders with the Netherlands and Belgium. He began using the newly opened BerlinAachen telegraph line to send news to Berlin. However, the telegraph did not extend the 76 miles (122 km) to Brussels, Belgium's capital city and financial center. Reuter saw an opportunity to speed up news service between Brussels and Berlin by using homing pigeons to bridge that gap. In 1851, Reuter moved to London. After failures in 1847 and 1850, attempts by the Submarine Telegraph Company to lay an undersea telegraph cable across the English Channel, from Dover toCalais, promised success. Reuter set up his "Submarine Telegraph" office in October 1851 just before the opening of that undersea cable in November, and he negotiated a contract with theLondon Stock Exchange to provide stock prices from exchanges in continental Europe in return for access to the London prices, which he then supplied to stockbrokers in Paris. In 1865, Reuter's private firm was restructured, and it became a limited company (a corporation) called the Reuter's Telegram Company. Reuter had been naturalised as a British subject in 1857. Reuter's agency built a reputation in Europe for being the first to report news scoops from abroad, such as Abraham Lincolns assassination. Almost every major news outlet in the world now subscribes to Reuters' services, which operates in over 200 cities in 94 countries in about 20 languages. The last surviving member of the Reuters family founders, Marguerite, Baroness de Reuter, died at age 96 on 25 January 2009, after having suffered a series of strokes.

United Press International

United Press International (UPI) is a once-major international news agency, whosenewswires, photo, news film and audio services provided news material to thousands ofnewspapers, magazines and radio and television stations for most of the twentieth century. Today it is much smaller, with a different customer and product focus. Formally named "United Press Associations," for incorporation and legal purposes, but publicly known and identified as "United Press" or "UP," it was created by the 1907 "uniting" of three smaller news syndicates by Midwest newspaper publisher E. W. Scripps.[1][2][3] It became "United Press International" fifty-one years later with its absorption of theInternational News Service or "INS". As either UP or UPI, the agency was among the largest newswire services in the world, competing for about ninety years with the Associated Press domestically and with AP, Reutersand Agence France-Presse internationally.

At its peak, UPI had more than 6,000 media subscribers; 2,000 full time employees; and 200 news bureaus in 92 countries. It began to decline as the circulation of afternoon newspapers, its chief client category, began to fall with the rising popularity of television news. Its decline accelerated after the 1982 sale of UPI by the Scripps company.[4] The E.W. Scripps Company controlled United Press until its absorption of William Randolph Hearst's smaller competing agency, INS, in 1958 to form UPI. With the Hearst Corporation as a minority partner, UPI continued under Scripps management until 1982.[1][2][3] Since its sale that year, UPI has changed ownerships several times and was twice in Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization. With each change in ownership came deeper service and staff cutbacks and changes of focus and a corresponding shrinkage of its traditional media customer base. Since the 1999 sale of its broadcast client list to its one-time major rival, the AP, UPI has concentrated on smaller information market niches and no longer services media organizations in a major way.[5] In 2000, UPI was purchased by News World Communications, an international news media company which was founded in 1976 byUnification Church leader Sun Myung Moon.[6][7] It now maintains a news website and photo service and electronically publishes several information product packages. Based mostly on aggregation from other sources on the web and gathered by a small editorial staff and stringers, UPI's daily content consists of a "newsbrief" summary service called "NewsTrack," which includes general, business, sports, science, health and entertainment reports and "Quirks in the News". It also sells a "premium" service which has deeper coverage and analysis of emerging threats, the security industry and energy resources. UPI's content is presented in text, video and photo formats, in the English, Spanish and Arabic languages.[8] UPI's main office is in Washington, D.C. and it maintains office locations in five other countries and uses freelance journalists in other major cities. HISTORY

United Press Associations

Beginning with the Cleveland Press, publisher E. W. Scripps (18541926) created the first chain of newspapers in the United States. Because the then recently reorganized Associated Press refused to sell its services to several of his papers, most of them evening dailies in competition with existing AP franchise holders, in 1907 Scripps merged three smaller syndicates under his ownership or control, the Publishers Press Association, the Scripps-McRae Press Association, and the Scripps News Association, to form United Press Associations, with headquarters in New York City.[1][2][3] Scripps had been a subscriber to an earlier news agency, also named United Press, that existed in the late 1800s, sometimes in cooperation with management of the original New York-based AP and sometimes in existential competition with two Chicago-based organizations also using the AP name (as detailed at Associated Press and in AP's 2007 history, Breaking News: How the Associated Press Has Covered War, Peace, and Everything Else, cited below).[1][2]

Drawing lessons from the battles between the earlier United Press and the various AP's, Scripps insisted that there should be no restrictions on who could buy news from a news service, and he made the new UP service available to anyone, including his competitors. Scripps also hoped to make a profit from selling that news to papers owned by others. At that time and until World War II, most newspapers relied on news agencies for stories outside their immediate geographic areas.[1][9] Despite strong newspaper industry opposition, UP started to sell news to the new and competitive radio medium in 1935, years before newspaper industry-controlled competitor AP did likewise. Scripps' United Press was considered "a scrappy alternative" news source to the AP. UP reporters were called "Unipressers" and were noted for their fiercely competitive streak.[9] Walter Cronkite, who started with United Press in Kansas City, gained fame for his coverage of World War II in Europe and turned downEdward R. Murrow's first offer of a CBS job to stay with UP, but who later went on to anchor the CBS Evening News, once said, "I felt every Unipresser got up in the morning saying, 'This is the day I'm going to beat the hell out of AP.' That was part of the spirit. We knew we were undermanned. But we knew we could do a darn good job despite that, and so many times, we did."[9] Another hallmark of the company's culture was that there was little formal training of reporters new hires were often thrust into a sink-or-swim situation of reporting on an unfamiliar subject, yet UP and later UPI became a training ground for a generation of journalists.[9][10] Generations of "Unipressers" (as cited in the introductory note by UPI VP and Editor-in-Chief Roger Tatarian in an undated 28-page booklet: "For the beginning Unipresser") were weaned on UP's famous and well-documented (though frequently misappropriated and misquoted) slogan of "Get it first, but FIRST, get it RIGHT." [1] Despite that and like all agencies that deal with huge volumes of timely information, UP and later UPI had its share of remembered mistakes. As recounted in the various printed histories of UPI cited below, the most famous one came early in its history. UP's president, Roy Howard, then traveling in France, telegraphed that the 1918 armistice ending World War I had been declared four days before it happened. Howard's reputation survived and he later became a Scripps partner, whose name appeared in one of the Scripps subsidiary companies, Scripps-Howard. But the mistake dogged UP/UPI for generations. Still, the agency's reporters were often able to tell stories more quickly and accurately although they were usually outnumbered by the competition.[4] In 1950, for example, UP reported the invasion of South Korea by North Korea two hours and forty minutes before its archrival, the AP.[1] The New York Times later apologized to UP for refusing to print information on the invasion until the AP had confirmed it.[1] [1] [edit]United

Press International

Frank Bartholomew, the last UP president to ascend to the agency's top job directly from its news, rather than sales, ranks, took over in 1955, and according to his cited autobiography, he was obsessed with merging UP with the International News Service, a news agency that had been founded by William Randolph Hearst in 1909 following Scripps' lead. Bartholomew succeeded in putting the I in UPI in the spring of 1958, when UP and INS merged to become United Press International.

The new UPI now had 6,000 employees and 5,000 subscribers, about a thousand of them newspapers.[9][11] The merger was aimed at creating a stronger competitor for the Associated Press and a stronger economic entity than either UP or INS. The newly formed United Press International (UPI) had 950 client newspapers.[11] Fearing possible anti-trust issues with the EisenhowerAdministration Justice Department, Scripps and Hearst rushed the merger through with unusual speed and in unusual secrecy. All UP employees were retained, but most INS employees lost their jobs with practically no warning, although some joined the new UPI and the columns of popular INS writers, such as Bob Considine, Louella Parsons and Ruth Montgomery, were carried by UPI.[11] Rival AP was a publishers' cooperative and could assess its members to help pay the extraordinary costs of covering major newswars, the Olympic Games, national political conventions. UPI clients, in contrast, paid a fixed annual rate; depending on individual contracts, UPI could not always ask them to help shoulder the extraordinary coverage costs. In its heyday, newspapers typically paid UPI about half what they paid AP in the same cities for the same services: At one point, for example, the Chicago Sun-Times paid AP $12,500 a week, but UPI only $5,000; the Wall Street Journal paid AP $36,000 a week, but UPI only $19,300. The AP, which serviced 1,243 newspapers at the time, remained UPI's main competitor.[9][11] In 1959, UPI had 6,208 clients in 92 countries and territories, 234 news and picture bureaus, and an annual payroll of $34,000,000, ($256,187,858) in today's dollars.[9][12] The UP-INS merger involved another business component that was to hurt the new UPI company badly in later years. Because INS had been a subsidiary of Hearst's King Features Syndicate and Scripps controlled several other newspaper syndicates, due to possible anti-trust issues, the two companies deliberately kept their respective syndicates out of the combined UPI company. That move cost UPI the revenues of its previous United Feature Syndicate subsidiary, which in later years made large profits on the syndication of Peanuts and other popularcomic strips and columns. UPI had an advantage of independence over the AP in reporting on the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Because the AP was a cooperative essentially owned by the newspapers, those in the South influenced its coverage of the racial unrest and protests, often ignoring, minimizing, or slanting the reporting.[9] UPI did not have that sort of pressure, and management, according to UPI reporters and photographers of the day, allowed them much freedom in chronicling the events of the civil rights struggle.[9] White House reporter Helen Thomas became the public face of UPI, as she was seen at televised press conferences beginning in the early 1960s.[9] UPI famously scooped the AP in reporting the assassination of US President John Kennedy on Friday, November 22, 1963.[9] UPI White House reporter Merriman Smith was an eyewitness, and he commandeered the press car's only phone to dictate the story to UPI as AP reporter Jack Bell triedwithout successto wrest the phone away so he could call his office.[4] Smith and UPI won a Pulitzer Prize for this reporting.

UP / UPI Newspictures, Newsfilm and Audio/Radio Network

United Press had no direct wirephoto service until 1952, when it absorbed co-owned Acme Newsphotos, under pressure from parent company Scripps to better compete with AP's news and photo services.[13]

By that time, UP was also deeply involved with the newer visual medium of television. In 1948, it entered into a partnership with 20th Century Fox subsidiary Fox Movietone News to shoot newsfilm for television stations. That service, United Press Movietone, or UPMT, was a pioneer in newsfilm syndication and numbered among its clients major US and foreign networks and local stations, including for many years the early TV operation of ABC News. In subsequent decades, it underwent several changes in partnerships and names, becoming best-known as United Press International Television News or UPITN. Senior UPITN executives later helped Ted Turner create CNN, with its first two presidents, Reese Schonfeld and Burt Reinhardt, coming from UPITN ranks. The UPI Audio actuality service for radio stations, created in 1958 and later renamed the United Press International Radio Network, was a spinoff from the newsfilm service and eventually provided news material to more than a thousand radio stations and US and foreign networks, including NPR.
[14]

[edit]Decline UPI came close to equaling the size of the AP in the early 1960s, but as newspaper revenue began to dwindle, it was dropped by papers that could no longer afford to subscribe to both UPI and the AP.[9] UPI's failure to develop a television presence or subsidiary television news service has also been cited as one of the causes of its decline.[9] By the early 1980s, the number of staffers was down to 1,800 and there were just 100 news bureaus.[10] Under pressure from some of E.W. Scripps' heirs, the Scripps company, which had been underwriting UPI's expenses at a loss for at least two decades, began trying transfer control of UPI in the early 1980s. It tried to bring in additional newspaper industry partners and when that failed, engaged in serious negotiations with British competitor Reuters, which wanted to increase its US presence. As detailed in "Down to the Wire", by Gordon and Cohen, cited below, Reuters did extensive due diligence and expressed an interest in parts of the UPI service, but did not wish to maintain it in full. Scripps wound up giving the agency away to two inexperienced businessmen, Douglas Ruhe and William Geissler, originally associated with two better-known partners, who soon departed. Ruhe and Geissler obtained UPI for the nominal price of $1 and were given a Scripps loan of $5 million, which was never repaid.[4] Facing news industry skepticism about their background and qualifications to run an international news agency, Ruhe and Geissler watched an increase in contract cancellations. Despite serious cash flow problems, they moved UPI's headquarters from New York City to Washington DC, incurring additional major costs due to construction cost overruns. During this period, UPI's 25-year old audio news actuality service for radio stations was renamed the United Press International Radio Network. But faced with recurring cash shortages and difficulty meeting payroll, the Ruhe-Geissler management sold UPI's foreign photo service and some rights to its US and foreign photos to the Reuters news agency.[15] It also sold UPI's photo library, which included the archives of predecessor Scripps photo agency Acme and the pictures and negatives of International News Photos, the picture component of Hearst's INS to the Bettman Archive. Bettman was later sold to Microsoft founder Bill Gates's separate Corbis Corporation, which continues to control the images of UPI and its predecessor agencies, storing them underground in

Pennsylvania and digitizing them for licensing, frequently without any notation of their UPI origins. In August, 2011 Corbis announced a deal with AP to distribute each other's photos to their clients, effectively combining the pre-1983 UPI library with that of its former main rival for some marketing purposes.[16] UPI's remaining minority stake in United Press International Television News (UPITN) was also sold and the agency was renamed Worldwide Television News (WTN). As with its photographs, UPI thereby lost all control of its newsfilm and video library, which is now held by WTNsuccessor Associated Press Television News, which entered the video news field long after UPI left it. Years of mismanagement, missed opportunities and continual wage and staff cuts followed.[4] By 1984, UPI had descended into the first of two Chapter 11 bankruptcies.[4] Mario Vzquez Raa, a Mexican media magnate, with a nominal American minority partner, Houston real estate developer Joseph Russo, purchased UPI out of bankruptcy for $40 million, losing millions during his short tenure, and firing numerous high level staff.[4] In 1988, Vzquez Raa sold UPI to Infotechnology Inc. an information technology and venture capital company and parent company of cable TV's Financial News Network, both headed by Earl Brian, who also became UPI chairman.[4] In early 1991, Infotechnology filed for bankruptcy, announced layoffs at UPI and sought to terminate certain employee benefits in an attempt to keep UPI afloat. At that point, UPI was down to 585 employees.[5][17] Later that year, UPI filed for bankruptcy, asking for relief from $50 million in debt so that it could be sale-able.[17] In 1992, a group of Saudi investors, ARA Group International (AGI), bought the bankrupt UPI for $4 million.[10] By 1998, UPI had fewer than 250 employees and 12 offices.[10] Although the Saudi-based investors had poured more than $120 million into UPI, it had failed to turn a profit.[10] The company had begun to sell Internet-adapted products to websites such as Excite and Yahoo.[10] At that point, the CEO embarked on "an ambitious agenda" to turn UPI into an Internet media service that delivered the news in a dramatic and colorful manner.[10] That year, UPI launched its first version of a direct-toconsumer website.[10] UPI executives told Forbes that they also hoped to develop and provide subscription Internet news packages that were narrowly tailored for corporate and special-interest clients.[10] In August 1999, UPI closed its radio network and broadcast wire operations, selling the remaining customer contracts to its longtime arch rival, AP. With that, UPI effectively left the traditional wire service field.

Current ownership
UPI was purchased in May 2000 by the Unification Church's media corporation, News World Communications, which, at the time, also owned the Washington Times and newspapers in South Korea, Japan, and South America.[6] In 2007 as part of a restructuring to keep UPI in business and profitable, management cut 11 staff from its Washington D.C. office and no longer has a reporter in the White House press corps or a bureau covering the United Nations.[6][18] UPI spokespersons and press releases said the company would be focusing instead on expanding operations in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa, and reporting on security threats, intelligence and energy issues.[6] [18] In 2008, UPI began UPIU, a journalism mentoring platform for students and journalism schools, that allows recent college graduates to post their work on the site, but does not pay for stories.[19]

As of March 2011, the [Link] website reports that the organization is headquartered in Washington, D.C., with other addresses in Seoul, South Korea; Beirut, Lebanon; Tokyo, Japan; Santiago, Chile; and Hong Kong, China.

CNN
Cable News Network (CNN) is a U.S. cable news channel founded in 1980 by Ted Turner.[1][2]Upon its launch, CNN was the first channel to provide 24-hour television news coverage,[3] and the first all-news television channel in the United States.[4] While the news channel has numerous affiliates, CNN primarily broadcasts from its headquarters at the CNN Center inAtlanta, the Time Warner Center in New York City, and studios in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. CNN is owned by parent company Time Warner, and the U.S. news channel is a division of the Turner Broadcasting System.[5] CNN is sometimes referred to as CNN/U.S. to distinguish the American channel from its international counterpart, CNN International. As of August 2010, CNN is available in over 100 million U.S. households.[6] Broadcast coverage extends to over 890,000 American hotel rooms, [6] and the U.S broadcast is also shown in Canada. Globally, CNN programming airs through CNN International, which can be seen by viewers in over 212 countries and territories.[7]Starting late 2010, the domestic version CNN/U.S., is available in high definition to viewers in Japan under the name CNN HD. HISTORY

Early history
The Cable News Network was launched at 5:00 p.m. EST on Sunday June 1, 1980. After an introduction by Ted Turner, the husband and wife team of David Walker and Lois Hart anchored the first newscast.[8]Burt Reinhardt, the then executive vice president of CNN, hired most of CNN's first 200 employees, including the network's first news anchor, Bernard Shaw.[9] Since its debut, CNN has expanded its reach to a number of cable and satellite television companies, several web sites, specialized closed-circuit channels (such as CNN Airport Network), and a radio network. The company has 36 bureaus (10 domestic, 26 international), more than 900 affiliated local stations, and several regional and foreign-language networks around the world. The channel's success made a bona-fide mogul of founder Ted Turner and set the stage for the Time Warner conglomerate's eventual acquisition of Turner Broadcasting. A companion channel, CNN2, was launched on January 1, 1982 and featured a continuous 24-hour cycle of 30-minute news broadcasts. A year later, it changed its name to "CNN Headline News", and eventually it was simply called "Headline News". (In 2005, Headline News would break from its original format with the addition of Headline Prime, a prime-time programming block that features news commentary; and in 2008 the channel changed its name again, to "HLN".) STAFF: CNN's current president is Ken Jautz. He replaced Jonathan Klein on September 24, 2010

Political contributors
Liberals: Conservatives:

Paul Begala Hilary Rosen James Carville Roland S. Martin Donna Brazile

Ed Rollins William Bennett Amy Holmes Tara Wall Alex Castellanos Sam Dealey

Political analysts
Jack Cafferty, Commentator Gloria Borger, Senior Political Analyst Candy Crowley, Senior Political Correspondent Ali Velshi, Chief Business Correspondent Jeffrey Toobin, Senior Legal Analyst Bill Schneider, Senior Political Analyst David Gergen, Senior Political Analyst John King, Chief National Correspondent Jill Dougherty, Foreign Affairs Correspondent