I got to AP the wire around 1998 via Michael Lord Welles (Mike Welles). I was hired under the Mark Berns and Jim Kennedy era.
I vividly recall Jim Kennedy saying: " You really gotta love the news to work here." At the time, I didn't realize what that meant was that this was because management was not going to spend any effort pushing for salary increases.
As Ruth Gersh remarked, you can spell "Cheap" without saying "AP".
At the time, The AP Wire was housed in 50 Rockefeller Center on the 4th floor. I had been told that there was no more space in the AP Building at 30 Rockefeller Center, so we had been moved to the "International" Building: the Internet at the time being synonymous or sympathetic with "International".
I had possibly the best office cubicle I've ever been in. It was the corner which had to windows. Turning my head to the right, looking out of the window facing SW, I was at eye level with Atlas holding up the cosmos, and we'd commiserate. Straight ahead, east-south, was Saint Patrick's Cathedral.b
The windows could be opened! Every Saint Patrick's Day, AP photographers would head to that corner and open the windows to shoot pictures of what was going on at the cathedral entrance and of the parade down 5th Avenue.
One of the thrills of working there was walking in and seeing rows of people typing away at news stories. Aside from the upgrade from typewriters to computer terminals, the scene could be something like the 1950s office at the Daily Planet in a Superman movie.
There is one program I wrote for the front page back then that I still have on GitHub called lead-sentence. It tries to find the leading sentence or two of a news story.
I just tried the program (Oct 13, 2026), and it still works!
One day a request came: show just the lead sentence of a news story on the front page. This wouldn't be much of a challenge if you just marked up the news story to add, say, two spaces instead of one at the place you'd like the lead sentence to end. But we were told that having editors do that would be impossible. The head programmer couldn't see a way to do this, and I thought this would be a nice challenge of heuristic programming.
To get some sense of the challenge in finding sentence endings, consider how "." is overloaded. It could be used in an abbreviation as in:
DETROIT (AP) _ General Motors Corp. and the United Auto Workers reached tentative agreement today on a new local contract at a key parts plant near Milwaukee, averting a threatened strike.
BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) _ The European Union's antitrust chief said Tuesday Boeing Co. must rethink its exclusive supplier arrangements if it hopes to win EU approval for a proposed merger with McDonnell Douglas Corp. Karel Van Miert said the EU's executive agency is seeking ``a remedy from the company that satisfies us.''
LOS ANGELES (AP) _ Actor Robert Young, star of TV shows "Father Knows Best," and "Marcus Welby, M.D." has died.
But it could also appear as a dot in a number:
NEW YORK (AP) _ The Dow industrials closed at 7,760.78, down 11.31.
And sometimes there can be other misleading sentence-ending punctuation like "!":
Foote Cone handles advertising for Nabisco cookie brands like Oreos, Chips Ahoy! and SnackWells as well as Life Savers candy and Fleischmann's, Bluebonnet and Parkay margarines and spreads.
A final tweak in the program was required when we realized that the initial specification needed tweaking. We really want the lead sentence, but instead the least sentences that fit _between_ 10 and 200 letters.
We realized this when a story came out that started something like:
POW! Another Batman movie strikes success at the box office!
When I worked at AP 1998-2000, one fun adventure was to visit the main data center exit 8A Cranbury, NJ right off the NJ Turnpike.
Fun fact: Cranbury was originally named Cranberry. Cranberry bogs are not too far away. However, a priest thought this too undignified and renamed it to the more staid British-sounding "Cranbury".
This building was about 50 miles away from Rockefeller Center and took a bit over an hour to get to.
I looked a while back, and I don't think the building is used by AP anymore. In a corner of the building was the biggest satellite dish I've ever seen. From the street view, the building looked like a one-story brick office building of no consequence. But from the air, you'd see this huge satellite dish.b
I was told that this was one of two satellite dishes feeding data. The other was in Kansas, and that in an emergency, the U.S. Government could take over the satellite dish for its purposes.
