On the day of Kent Cooper’s funeral in February 1965, the flow of news through the international Associated Press network — the institution he spent a 40-year career building — came to a complete stop. In scores of AP bureaus and thousands of newsrooms around the world, the printers that hammered out the news fell silent.
This tribute to a man who changed the kind of news millions of readers and listeners relied on, and opened the way for its global spread, lasted only a minute before the torrent of news resumed. But it was AP’s highest honor, a vivid testimony to the institutional importance of the man widely known to journalists in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Africa as K.C.
Almost a century after Cooper became AP’s general manager, what can we learn from his career and the development of the institution he led?
