How the CEO of the Associated Press Navigates a Challenging World

You won’t find many American institutions older than the 179-year-old Associated Press, which tells you that the global, non-profit news organization has incredible staying power. Though, as CEO Daisy Veerasingham can tell you, keeping the AP thriving is more challenging than ever.

The fraught environment she faces is well-known: an endlessly shifting and degrading business model, threats from AI, erosion of trust in media, and attacks from Washington, D.C. But Veerasingham—an upbeat Brit with a law degree who has run the AP since 2021—is game to take it all on. She even learned to call what she knew as football, “soccer,”—as opposed to U.S. football—an important distinction for an executive ultimately responsible for something as sacred as the AP Top 25 College Football Poll.

I spoke with Veerasingham about the AP and the swirling world of the news business, as well as covering the war in Gaza, and her organization’s litigation with Donald Trump’s White House, as part of our At Barron’s interview series. Below are excerpts from the interview, which have been edited.

Barron’s: Tell us about the business model of the Associated Press. How does that work?

Daisy Veerasingham: The AP is an independent, not-for-profit news organization, and predominantly a business-to-business provider. Think about any media or information business anywhere in the world, and chances are they’re a customer of the Associated Press.

We started in 1846 as a newspaper cooperative as a way of sharing costs. Essentially, that is still its structure today. Everything that we make gets reinvested back into the organization.

In the last few years, we have moved into more of a direct-to-consumer strategy as well. It’s not a big part of what we do, but it is part of our diversification strategy.

Let’s talk a little bit about direct-to-consumer because there’s such a hunger for non-partisan news. You’ve been building this out. When you do that, are you competing against your customers?

We really leaned into going direct-to-consumer roughly at the time I took over. It was driven by the fact that in the U.S., we could see a gap in non-partisan news. We’re not competing with our customers because we’re really trying to go after a very niche part of the audience. One of the most amazing things about the AP is that if you take any news market in the world and you look at different organizations there, they have different political and ideological leanings. The AP provides the same news report to every single news organization every single day. We don’t change it, and we don’t nuance it. And that really gets to the heart of how we are nonpartisan.

Is the website free for consumers?

It is a free website with advertising, but we are leaning into the donation model, which is: ‘You like the AP? Do you believe in the work that we do? Then make a donation to help support the public service mission so that we can continue.’

Is there really a market for non-partisan news? To play the contrarian, many people like to have the echo chamber of cable news.

There’s certainly a B-to-B market still for independent, non-partisan news, and there is a place in the whole news ecosystem. It may not be a large place, but there’s certainly a place where people want to just have the facts. They want to make their own decision or conclusion about what’s going on. And that’s the role the AP plays.

How big is the AP? And how do you measure that?

The AP operates in about 100 countries around the world. We have journalists in every single one of them, and we have commercial operations in many of those countries as well. Our estimate is that we reach half the world’s population every single day. Our job is to ensure that we are able to manage the AP from a financial perspective and are able to invest in journalism and all of the other things that go with running a news organization: cybersecurity, products, tech development, and infrastructure. That is how we judge the success of the AP, its ability to remain independent.

What about diversification beyond the direct-to-consumer?

Diversification comes from customer groups, from business models, and from geographic expansion as well. About 40% of our overall revenue comes from outside of the U.S., so geographic diversification has certainly been important. Our customer groups have changed. When we were founded, we were essentially a newspaper organization. That’s how we stayed for many years. Today, newspapers have been under tremendous pressure, so we’ve had to diversify our business over the last 10 years or so to broadcasters and technology platforms.

If I were to look forward over the next few years, newspapers would actually be a very small contributing part of the AP, with these other customer segments—broadcasters and tech platforms—now being bigger contributors.

Our move to being direct-to-consumer has also been about being able to tap into advertising, donations, and subscriptions as part of our business model. We’ve set up the APFJ, the Associated Press Fund for Journalism, which is a philanthropic part of the AP, so we lean into philanthropy a little bit to help support those parts of the news ecosystem where revenue can’t. Local and state newspapers are really good examples of where we’re using philanthropy to help support the news industry in the U.S.

Interesting you mention local news in the U.S. and raising money in a philanthropic way.

I think we are the only organization that still maintains a 50-state footprint. That means we cover news from all 50 states, including many of the state capitals. But as local news has come under more and more pressure, and they are not necessarily some of our biggest customers anymore, we had to think of new ways to help support that local news infrastructure.

One of the things the Associated Press Fund for Journalism is trying to do is fundraise to help better support the local news infrastructure. Essentially, we fundraise and help support lots of not-for-profit newsrooms that have risen, stepped in, and filled some of those news deserts by using that money to provide AP content and services to help these organizations become more vibrant parts of their local community.

AI is a big threat—or maybe a big opportunity. You have partnerships with ChatGPT and with Google. How are you harnessing this power?

Very early on, we established two principles that guided us through the last couple of years: A piece of intellectual property must be protected. And we must maintain or gain a fair value for what our journalists do every single day. Those two principles have guided the commercial deals that we have done.

[Editor’s note: News Corp, the parent company of Barron’s owner Dow Jones, has commercial deals with Alphabet and OpenAI.]

Like it or not, AI is going to fundamentally change the way in which we work, the way in which news is created, and the way in which audiences engage with news. You have to embrace that and put guardrails against it because there are both challenges and huge opportunities to this technology. A good example of a guardrail is we update our standards on a fairly regular basis around journalists’ use of the technology itself. That’s a good example of how you can put guardrails against AI, but also still really be aggressively moving forward with that.

You’re confident that your licensing deals with these new forms are not going to threaten your future and are fair to you, because other news organizations don’t seem to share that opinion.

I think the advantage that we have is we’re a licensing business. That is what we have been doing for hundreds of years. We had a licensing framework established already against which we could measure value. That ability to value it against other things has given us the confidence to move forward.

How difficult is it for the AP to cover the war in Gaza?

It’s extremely difficult. We are one of the few news organizations that still have staff in Gaza. We’ve been covering this war since its inception by our team, who were based there. I will be very honest, our biggest concern every single day is the safety and security of our staff. That is our overriding priority. It is not easy, and getting harder and harder. They have done tremendous work under extremely difficult circumstances. It is really important work they do because they are bearing witness to what is going on in Gaza, at a time when it is very difficult to get other journalists to be able to cover what’s happening.

We have a very strong team in Ukraine also, and, again, it’s very complex to cover. Security of staff is probably always our biggest, biggest worry. We have a huge team of people working daily to ensure not just the coverage, but our staff are kept safe.

Another thorny issue for you, Daisy, is litigation with the White House. What’s the latest on that right now? [For more on that lawsuit, read here.]

At the moment, the case is due to be heard on its merits. The district court actually ruled in our favor, and the White House is appealing against that; the case is due to be heard towards the end of the year. How is it impacting us in terms of our coverage? Day to day, I would say that we’re able to cover the president of the United States in the way that we were before. We have access on a daily basis. So it hasn’t had as much impact, probably, as people would perceive it to have had.

How do you see the future of the news business? There are some people who suggest that it’s a winner-take-all type of environment where big organizations like the New York Times , the Wall Street Journal, which shares a parent company with Barron’s, maybe the Washington Post, and maybe the AP, dominate the landscape.

I think it’s really difficult to predict the future at this moment. Being able to see beyond a couple of years is almost impossible. Then you layer in the impact of AI, and that makes the ability to look forward even harder. I think the AP will always have a role to play because of the fact that we are a news agency, that we are a supplier to the broader news industry [and platforms.] I think the product portfolio will probably change, but I think the role that we play is still as important today as it has ever been.

Daisy, I’m old enough to remember when there was a Coke versus Pepsi rivalry in your business: the AP and UPI, the United Press International, the latter being a shadow of itself today. How is it that the AP has survived, and UPI didn’t so much?

I think it’s our clarity of mission and purpose. Also, being completely independent and understanding that we have to make money in order to support that mission. It keeps us moving and keeps us nimble. We don’t have anyone else to rely on. Being part of the news industry is not an easy place to be. We have to keep reinventing ourselves, and I guess I take comfort, if there is some comfort to be taken, in that we’ve survived many changes in the ecosystem and we’ve adapted, and that’s what we’re having to do again.

There are all kinds of cool facets to the AP that maybe people don’t even realize. For instance, all the incredible news photography, which is such a strength of the AP, and the College Football Top 25 Poll. How do you oversee all these things and prioritize what’s important?

It’s very much driven like any business, by looking at what’s important from a business perspective and what engages audiences. One of the things I’m the most proud of is that in the last few years: We have taken the AP’s total output to being over 75% visual. And that plays to the fact that today’s digital audience engages with visual content, and that’s been a really key component of our strategy, which is to make the AP a very visually driven organization. The tremendous photo journalism that we do, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism, bears witness to what happens around the world.

I assume you’re on all the social media platforms. Are you on TikTok?

We have a presence on all of the social media platforms. As we’re not a very heavy direct-to-consumer business, that is not a key component, but it’s an important part of our growth in the consumer space.

Daisy Veerasingham, thanks very much.

Write to Andy Serwer at andy.serwer@barrons.com. Follow him on X and subscribe to his At Barron’s podcast.