Swot Analysis Of United Press International

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UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL United Press International (UPI) is an international news agency whose news, photos, news film, and audio services provided news material to thousands of newspapers and magazines, radio and television for most of the 20th century. At its peak, it had more than 6,000 media subscribers.UPI has concentrated on smaller information-market. United Press International is a leading provider of news, photos and information to millions of readers around the globe via UPI.com and its licensing services. With a history of reliable reporting dating back to 1907, today's UPI is a credible source for the most important stories of the day, continually updated - a one-stop site for U.S. and world news, as well as entertainment, trends,…show more content…
The newly formed United Press International (UPI) had 950 client newspapers.Fearing possible anti-trust issues with the Eisenhower Administration Justice Department , Scripps and Hearst rushed the merger through with unusual speed and secrecy. Although all UP employees were retained, most INS employees lost their jobs with practically no warning. A relative few did join the new UPI and the columns of popular INS writers, such as Bob Considine,Louella Parsons and Ruth Montgomery were carried by UPI. Rival AP was a publishers' cooperative and could assess its members to help pay the extraordinary costs of covering major news—wars, 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 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 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,…show more content…
Because INS had been a subsidiary of Hearst's King Features Syndicate and Scripps controlled several other newspaper syndicates, both companies feared possible anti-trust issues. So they 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 popular comic 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 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. 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. White House reporter Helen became the public face of UPI, as she was seen at televised press conferences beginning in the early 1960s.UPI famously scooped the AP in reporting the assassination of US President Kennedy

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